


Kodokuna Shojo (A Lonely Girl)

by C_R_Scott



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU, DCU - Comicverse, Red Robin (Comics), Robin (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Horror, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-11-13 11:10:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/502893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/C_R_Scott/pseuds/C_R_Scott
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Ignores the DCnU reboot) A tale of two Robins wrapped up in an Asian-style horror story.  Tim Drake goes to Japan for business, both for Wayne Enterprises and Batman Incorporated.  However, when he returns to Gotham City, it's Damian Wayne who discovers he brought along more from his trip overseas than just his luggage and mission report.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Well Under the Cherry Blossoms

The old water well beneath the large gnarled cherry tree seemed so innocuous at first glance. It was a simple round well beneath a tall wooden crossbar that held a rusty pulley system without any rope or bucket. The well itself was several yards in diameter, and had been crafted probably a century ago with stones and mortar. There was a wooden lid on top that was supposed to have been locked in place, but the chains holding it in place appeared to have been cut.

“[Someone desperate for a drink?]” Red Robin mused aloud in fluent Japanese as he knelt down to examine the destroyed restraints.

“[Desperate for luck is more like it,]” Mister Unknown, the Batman of Japan, said with a frown. “[It is that time of year, after all.]”

“[What time is that?]”

“[College entrance exams.]”

It was 1 am in the woods just outside of Hachiōji, a city inside the prefecture of Tokyo, Japan. When Timothy Drake arrived in the Land of the Rising Sun just sixteen hours earlier, he hadn’t intended to don his cape and cowl at all during this trip. He and Tamara Fox had been sent to Japan for the start of a week-long Asian tour to promote Wayne Enterprise’s “Neon Knights” youth outreach program in that part of the world.

However, when Jiro Osamu, Batman Incorporated’s representative in Japan, alias Mister Unknown, contacted Oracle for help on a perplexing case, she immediately put him in touch with Red Robin, who was already halfway across the Pacific at the time.

“[So, am I safe to assume that this is supposed to be a lucky well?]” Tim asked as he began to remove his cape and cowl.

Mr. Unknown looked at the younger vigilante with a startled expression, but relaxed when he saw that the young man wore a simple black domino mask beneath the cowl, protecting his identity. He nodded. “[Over a century ago there used to be a shrine here. This well is all that’s left of the original structure. Everything else has been reclaimed by the forest. It’s a local tradition, since before I was born, that students who are able to find the well in these woods and drink from it are guaranteed to pass their exams.]”

Tim pulled out a full face-mask rebreather and checked it to make sure it was working properly. “[But now, instead of passing their exams, the kids who are drinking from the well are committing suicide.]”

“[Yes and no,]” Mr. Unknown said, drawing a confused look from Red Robin. “[Yes, the kids are committing suicide, but they are still passing their exams. That is what drew my attention to this case in the first place. If the kids had failed and committed suicide, well that would make sense. Tragic sense, but sense nonetheless. But these kids are passing with flying colors. There is no reason for all of them to end their lives right as they’re about to enter university.]”

Tim nodded before putting on the rebreather. “[So you think someone might’ve poisoned the well. For what purpose?]”

“[My theory? To get rid of the competition.]”

“[Is there really that much competition to get into university here?]”

Mr. Unknown smiled wryly. “[I know it must seem strange to an American, with so many choices for higher education available to you in your country, but here in Japan space in the top schools is at a constant premium. Where one goes to university can very well make or break your career, especially if you have high aspirations.]”

Briefly, the young man behind Red Robin’s mask wondered he’d ever find the time to go to college.

Once upon a time, it seemed like a foregone conclusion. Now though…

Tim set the thought aside. There was no point in mulling over it now, not while he had a job to do. Once his breathing mask was on, Mr. Unknown offered him one end of a length of long black rope.

“[Any idea on how deep the water is down there?]”

Mr. Unknown shook his head. “[Sorry.]”

Tim sighed and took hold of the rope. “[Hopefully a swim won’t be necessary tonight.]”

A minute later, Red Robin finally reached the water’s surface deep in the bottom of the well. This far below the earth’s surface, the air was so cold and damp that the chill reached deep into the teenage vigilante and clung to his bones. He used a free hand to run two fingers along the side of the well, noting a large amount of slick algae coating the aged stones. He put a sample into one of the vials from his utility belt.

“[Did you reach the water?]” Mr. Unknown’s voice crackled through earpiece he wore.

“[Yeah. I’m here,]” he said, his voice reaching Mr. Unknown through the built in microphone in his rebreather. With one hand still holding onto the rope he’d used to rappel down the well, he used his free hand to pull out his collapsed bo. With a sharp flick of his wrist, he extended the metal fighting staff to its full length and used it to measure the depth of the water. He breathed a small sigh of relief when he felt the bottom with it. “[The water’s going to be about chest deep on me,]” he observed aloud as he put his staff away. Then he let go of the rope and dropped into the water with a startled gasp.

_“Christ, that’s cold!”_  he thought as he tightened his jaw to prevent his teeth from chattering.  _“Feels just a few degrees short of freezing. Better get this done quick. Not sure how I’d explain cancelling tomorrow’s Neon Knights meetings because of hypothermia in the middle of summer.”_

With numbing fingers, Tim pulled another vial from his belt and filled it with water for testing. Then he took out his flashlight and began to look for anything suspicious in the water.

“[Crap.]”

“[What’s wrong, Red Robin?]”

“[I can’t see the bottom,]” he sighed. “[I’m going to have to go underwater to complete my search.]” Tim regarded the water with a wry expression before slowly slipping beneath the surface.

Since he had the rebreathing mask, he didn’t have to worry about holding his breath, or dealing with the freezing water getting into his eyes and messing with his vision. It was still very dark, though, and the flashlight did little to illuminate his underwater surroundings. It was almost as if the darkness was swallowing up the beam of light he was trying to see with. Slowly, methodically, Tim searched the bottom of the well, minimally by sight and mostly by touch. With his flashlight clipped to his bandoliers, he used both his hands to reach out ahead of him, feeling the stone floor for anything out of the ordinary.

It was eerie searching the well this way. The darkness was so engulfing that he could barely see his hands when they were completely extended in front of him. The fact that his gloves were black in color did nothing to help the matter whatsoever.

Then Tim froze.

His left hand had brushed against something soft, and a chill that had absolutely nothing to do with the water’s temperature immediately raced down his spine. His hand recoiled quickly in instinctive revulsion.

Tim’s heart thudded in his ears as he turned to the source of the sensory anomaly. Whatever it was lay just beyond his sight in the inky black water. He awkwardly detached his flashlight from the bandoliers that crossed his chest and tried to shine a beam in that general direction. Unfortunately, the blasted device decided at that moment to start going on the fritz. The light from the flashlight began to flicker.

Once…

Twice…

Then the beam of light stuttered wildly before winking out altogether. All of a sudden, total darkness swallowed him up.

Tim tapped the flashlight blindly against the palm of his hand, trying to beat some life back into it, but it did no good. He shuddered. The water felt as if it had suddenly dropped another five or ten degrees in temperature.

“[Unknown? Are you there?]” he asked aloud, hoping the comm link in his rebreather was still working.

“[I’m here,]” a voice responded in his ear. “[Are you alright. You sound shaky.]”

“[Just the water,]” Tim tried to reassure both his partner and, to a lesser degree, himself. “[It’s too cold. Listen, my flashlight just died. Do you have a spare?]”

“[Yeah.]”

“[Light it up and send it down. I can't see a thing down here.]”

“[Alright. It’ll be there in a minute.]”

“[Thanks.]” Despite the total darkness, Tim gritted his teeth and returned to his search for the thing he’d touched moments earlier. He tried to feel around in the same general direction, but found nothing. Slowly, he moved forward, his hands sweeping the well floor in wide arcs. They met no resistance. It confused him greatly.

_“Where is it?”_  he thought to himself. Unconsciously, he began to move about more anxiously in his blind search.  _“I’m sure it was right here a second ago! I know I felt something!”_

“[Here’s the flashlight,]” Unknown’s voice crackled into his ear again.

Tim looked up just in time to see the new flashlight break through the water’s surface, dragging down a stream of bubbles with it. The top-heavy Maglite tied to a thin cable shined a bright beam of welcome light down into his face. Tim smiled with relief now that he had something to chase away the darkness once more. His earlier anxiety fading, Tim turned his attention back to the floor of the well…

Only to find a pair of dead, sickly-colored milky eyes staring at him, inches away from his face.

*****

It was nearly four am when Tamara Fox was woken by the sound of the balcony door opening in the room adjacent to hers. With a yawn she sat up in bed and pulled on a robe over her nightgown. While a part of her thought she ought to just roll over and go back to sleep, because it was just a certain teenage vigilante ninja-boy coming in from his night job, another part (a part of her that had fast become the voice of self-preservation) convinced her that it was better to be safe than sorry and make sure it really was just the ninja boy she knew and not a ninja boy she didn't.

They were in Japan, after all.

Cautiously, she cracked her bedroom door open and peered into the common room of the two-bedroom hotel suite she was sharing with Timothy Drake. She relaxed considerably when she saw a familiar silhouette quietly closing the balcony door. Relief turned to concern, though, when she noticed something odd.

Red Robin’s cowl and cape were missing. All he wore to hide his identity was a black domino mask that he was slowly peeling off his face. His body language was all wrong too. She was used to seeing Tim return from a night’s patrol completely exhausted and/or physically injured. While it was clear he wasn't injured, there was something more than mere exhaustion weighing him down.

“Tim?” she said as she opened the bedroom door and fully stepped into the common room. “Are you alright?”

He paused in the middle of unzipping the collar of his uniform. Tim looked guilty for a moment, then forced an apologetic smile on his face. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry. Just go back to bed, I’m fine.”

Tam wasn't buying it. She crossed her arms across her chest. “So, how did it go? The case with Mr. Unknown?”

The fake smile Tim had tried wearing crumbled at the mention of the case. A haunted expression rose up in its place as he turned his gaze away from hers.

Tam would've sworn she’d just seen him shudder. The look on his face worried her and her arms uncrossed themselves as she walked over to him on bare feet. Her dark eyes widened a little as she noticed little things she hadn’t seen from a distance. “You’re soaking wet!” she exclaimed softly as she took in how both his hair and uniform were damp and dripping on the carpet. She reached out and placed a hand on his face. “Jesus Christ, Tim, you’re freezing!”

"I'm fine, Tam."

Maternal instincts that always seemed to kick in when Tim was unwell or injured around her sent Tam turning to go into the bathroom. “You need to get out of that uniform and get dried off— Or maybe a hot shower would be better?" Tam's voice came floating out of her bathroom along with the sounds of cloth being stripped off a metal towel rack. "Were you swinging around in the night air like that? Summer or not, you’re gonna catch pneumonia if you’re not careful—”

Her concerned stream of words trailed off as she came out of the bathroom, a large fluffy white towel in hand. Tim had taken a seat on the sofa and looked more shaken and miserable than she’d ever seen him before. He was hunched over slightly, elbows resting on his knees. His pale blue eyes were aimed at the rug beneath his feet, but his gaze was anywhere but inside the hotel suite.

Tam walked over to the sofa and stood in front of Tim. “What’s wrong, Tim?” she asked in a small, worried voice. “Did something bad happen tonight?”

“I know this might sound a little strange, but may I borrow your lap?”

“Hmm?” Tam looked at him in confusion, but when he finally raised pleading eyes to look at her the young woman’s expression softened and she nodded. Before she sat down, though, she took the towel and wrapped it about Tim’s back and shoulders like a blanket. Then she took a seat next to him on the sofa.

Once she was seated, Tim gingerly eased himself down, pillowing his head on Tam’s soft lap. He closed his eyes with a sigh, and the tension in his body relaxed as Tam laid a comforting hand on his chest.

“So… What happened tonight?” Tam asked after a moment of just letting Tim relax. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Tim was silent for so long that Tam almost thought he’d fallen asleep right then and there. Then he shook his head without a word. Clearly something had greatly upset him, but whatever it was, he didn’t want to share his troubles with her. Though he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) talk to her about it, Tam did her best to give him the comfort he needed as she sat with him through the rest of the night.

It was a good thing none of their business meetings were scheduled until the afternoon. Neither Tim nor Tam would get any sleep until sunrise, when the light of day could chase away the nightmares.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author Notes:**
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this first chapter of Kodokona Shojo: A Lonely Girl and are tempted to read onward. This story was originally started in September 2012, and was only recently completed. Due to real life issues, I'd stopped writing sometime after finishing Chapter 6 and took several months away from it. However, two months ago I picked this tale back up again, this time with the intention of finishing the story in its entirety before publishing it here on Ao3.org and elsewhere.
> 
> Due to being able to read the story in its entirety and edit the story as a whole, the first six chapters have been edited. There have been some small changes that were mostly for grammar and to make the story flow more smoothly from chapter to chapter.
> 
> Throughout the story, you will see speech text marked off with brackets like "[this]". This is an indication that a character is speaking in Japanese.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this story, and feel free to leave comments and critiques. I welcome both.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> ~CR Scott


	2. The Girl in White

_"Who is she?!"_

It had been bothering Damian all morning. Since his father, Bruce Wayne, had no choice but to spend the entire day at Wayne Enterprises, tied up in a series of essential meetings arranged by Lucius Fox, the youngest Wayne son had decided to follow suit and spend the day in the massive office building himself.

What Damian had not anticipated was that his least favorite adopted older brother, Timothy Drake-Wayne, was going to be back from his trip across Asia so soon. As far as he had known, Drake was supposed to have been gone for at least another week touring Wayne Enterprises holdings overseas. The ten-year-old’s disposition soured considerably upon seeing his brother attending the same meetings as their father. So focused was he on radiating disdainful passive-aggressive hostility towards Drake that it was only after the second meeting had been adjourned that he realized his brother wasn’t alone.

The little girl was maybe five or six, of Asian descent with long black hair and a complexion so pale that Drake’s own fair skin tone looked practically tanned next to her. She was a small, delicate child clothed in a white dress, though strangely without any shoes or socks.

It nagged at Damian as they moved from meeting to meeting. Who in their right mind would allow a child to walk around a professional office building barefooted? And for that matter, why did Drake bring a little girl with him to the office at all? Initially, Damian had assumed that the girl belonged to one of the other employees. Perhaps someone couldn’t find a babysitter or he somehow missed a "Bring Your Kid to Work Day" memo in his e-mail? However, as he observed the girl, it was clear she was following his brother around and belonged to no one else.

As the executives filed out of the fourth meeting that day, Damian kept his eyes focused squarely on the girl. For the first time that entire morning, as Tim and Bruce spoke over the content of the most recent meeting combined with the earlier ones with Lucius and his daughter Tamara, the small child noticed Damian.

Dark brown, nearly black eyes stared at Damian with a slight expression of surprise. She glanced around herself to see if he was quite possibly looking at someone or something else, but it soon became clear that she was the only person in his sights. The boy stared her down, a scowl set firmly on his face. Seemingly cowed by the stern glare, the little girl slowly blinked once before stepping behind Drake to hide, grabbing a small handful of the end of his suit jacket at the same time.

“Tim? Are you alright?” Bruce asked as the conversation the adults were having was interrupted by a sudden coughing fit. Tim’s eyes were tightly closed and he was slightly hunched over as he coughed into a handkerchief his adopted father had offered him.

“Yeah. I’m fi—” he managed to gasp out before more coughing cut him off abruptly.

Tam placed a hand on Tim’s back even as she frowned deeply with concern. ”I thought you went to the doctor yesterday. You’ve been sick ever since we left Tokyo.”

Tim’s coughing fit seemed to settle down and he straightened up with a pained expression. ”I did,” he said hoarsely as he massaged his throat with one hand. “He said there was nothing wrong. Most likely just a summer cold.”

Bruce’s eyes narrowed. “Take the rest of the day off, Tim. I’ll have Alfred schedule an appointment with Dr. Thompkins for today.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Tam insisted, her mouth taking a firm line as she crossed her arms over her chest. “You should’ve gone to her in the first place.”

“She was busy yesterday,” Tim argued weakly, but he knew, against the combined forces of both Bruce and Tam, he was outnumbered in a battle of wills.

Bruce looked to Tam. ”Will you make sure he gets to his appointment on time?”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

As Bruce and Lucius continued on to the next meeting, Tim and Tam made their way to the elevators, along with little girl. At the last possible moment, just as the elevator doors were sliding shut, Damian joined the three of them, unwilling to let that strange child out of his sight.

“Well that was inconsiderate of you, Drake,” the boy scolded callously as he jabbed the button for the first floor, drawing glares from both Tim and Tam, though Tam’s had a far sharper edge.

“Excuse me?”

Damian ignored Fox’s daughter and glared straight at his brother. ”Coming to the office while knowingly sick. Are you trying to infect the entire building?”

Tim’s brow furrowed and he opened his mouth as if to say one thing, but stopped, thought better of it, and decided to say something completely different. He snapped at his younger brother waspishly as he pinched the bridge of his nose to try and stem the headache that was building right behind his eyes. “You know what. I refuse to get into it with you today, Damian. I’ve had far too little sleep and not enough coffee to deal with your level of bullshit right now.”

Damian made a derisive noise. ”Whatever.” He turned his gaze to the elevator buttons as they blinked one by one the closer they got to the first floor. “You should watch your tongue though. I thought someone like you would have better sense than to use that kind of language in front of a little girl.”

Now Tam bristled visibly at Damian. “Little girl?!”

“Not you! I meant the child.”

“What child?” Tim asked, taking his hand away from his face.

Damian ground his teeth in frustration. ”Do you think I’m blind?! That kid that’s been following you around like a shadow all morning! She’s right—” He’d jerked his head to the rear of the elevator, directly behind the three of them. The hostility in his voice dissolved immediately into startled confusion. “—there?”

Tim and Tam both looked back. There was no one else in the elevator. The young couple shared a look before turning their gazes back to the stunned and gaping boy. ”Damian,” Tim started cautiously. “Tam and I have been here at Wayne Tower since 8 o'clock this morning. You’re the only kid we’ve been around all day.”

The elevator pinged and the doors slid open with a whisper. Tim looked as if he wanted to ask something more of his younger brother, but Tam tugged on his sleeve, her smartphone in hand. ”C’mon ninja boy. Mr. Pennyworth just texted me with your appointment time with Dr. Thompkins. We gotta get going.”

“I’ll… see you around, Damian,” Tim said hesitantly before stepping out of the elevator and toward the lobby entrance, where a car and driver were waiting for him and Tam outside.

Damian gave the otherwise empty elevator car one final visual sweep before dashing out straight for lobby’s security station. “You!” he said, pointing his finger at the guard on duty.

“Ah, good afternoon Mr. Wayne.”

“Never mind pleasantries. I demand to see the security feed from elevator number three.”

The guard looked at him in confusion. “But weren’t you just on that—”

“Just bring up the video!”

With a shrug, the guard pulled up the requested video feed. Damian watched with growing suspicion as he, Tim, and Tam rode the elevator alone from the fifty-second floor to the first.

”Where is she?” her muttered as he watched the video a second time.

“Who, sir?”

Damian made an exasperated noise. “Never mind.” The young man stalked back the elevator and stepped inside, pressing the number fifty-two. As the doors closed, he closed his eyes and shook his head.

 _“I know what I saw,”_  he thought to himself.  _“Drake had a little girl with him all morning. Where did she go? I know followed her into the elevator. Did she slip out before the doors closed and stayed upstairs? But... The security camera should’ve caught that too.”_

“[Why are you so cruel to him?]” A girl’s voice whispered into Damian’s ear in Japanese. Though he didn’t understand a word that was said, his Japanese being very weak among his known foreign languages, he could tell the tone was a questioning one. The next thing that was said, though, sounded far more sinister. The words sounded hissed more than merely spoken. “[You don’t deserve his kindness.]”

Damian’s eyes snapped open and he saw, reflected in the polished metal doors, the girl in white standing directly behind him. Immediately, he whirled about to confront her.

No one was there.

Uneasily, Damian looked back at the elevator doors. The only reflection he saw staring back at him was his own.


	3. A Life Saved?

Tim glanced over at the clock above the fireplace mantle, taking in the time. It was a little after 8pm, which drew an exasperated sigh out of him. The young man gave the warm fire beneath the clock a longing gaze before grudgingly turning his attention back to the electrical wall panel he was working on.

The digital touch screen had been completely pulled off and rested on the end table by Tim's knee. A once orderly mass of wires and circuit boards was in a state of semi-organized chaos as they hung from the neatly cut rectangular hole in the wall. Tim studied a complicated electrical schematic that was on the end table, frowned, then peered into the dark hole before pushing up the sleeve of his black and yellow striped leather jacket so he could gingerly reach inside for some small component he knew he was missing.

Suddenly there was a loud "CRACKLE-POP!" sound, a small flash of sparks, and a sharp yelp of pain as Tim quickly jerked his hand out of the hole. Once he was certain he still had all his fingers, and that they were barely even singed, he closed his hand into a fist and glared at the hole. He was tempted, so very tempted, to rip a page right out of Black Bat's book of dealing with problematic technology.

He set the thought aside, though, when the doorbell rang. Pulling down his sleeve, Tim went to see who was at the door.

"Alfred!" he exclaimed, his grumpy expression replaced by one far more inviting. Tim smiled at the man who was like a grandfather to him as he welcomed him into his home. "What are you doing here at this hour?"

The lean, silver haired old man held up a thermos. "I though you could use something for that cold of yours," he said kindly as he stepped into the house. As Tim shut the door behind him, Alfred unexpectedly stopped midway to the kitchen, contemplative look on his face.

"What's wrong?"

Alfred turned to Tim. "Miss Fox had called me earlier this afternoon to request that I find some way convince you to leave, and I quote, 'that meat locker he calls a home', unquote, and get you to rest somewhere warmer." After setting the thermos of soup down on the counter, the old man drew his unbuttoned sweater closed. "I had no idea she was speaking in such a literal sense."

Tim smiled with a shake of his head. "On top of being sick, for some reason my thermostat's been all screwed up since I got back from Japan." He motioned toward the gutted wall panel he'd been working on moments earlier. "The damn house just won't warm up. Thankfully the gas works just fine, so I can light up the fireplace, but I can’t get the heater to kick on at all."

“What about turning off the air conditioning?”

“That’s just it, Alfred. The A/C hasn’t been on at all since I got back to Gotham.” Tim made an exasperated sound as he glared at the disemboweled wall thermostat. “I don’t know what the heck is going on with this stupid thing.”

Alfred nodded thoughtfully. "It's no wonder you're sick, if this is the climate you’ve been trying to rest in."

"It doesn't matter," Tim said with a shrug as he watched Alfred go into the kitchen and pour the steaming hot soup from the thermos into a mug. "I haven't been sleeping well lately anyways." Gratefully, he took the offered mug and warmed his hands with it. "Between this and being sick and the jet lag and the nightmares..."

"Nightmares?"

A troubled expression crossed Tim’s face. "I had a Bat Inc. case in Tokyo go south on me," Tim admitted reluctantly after taking a sip from the mug. “Spent part of a very long night stuck in a very old well full of very cold water. It’s probably how I got sick in the first place.”

"Anything you wish to talk about?"

Tim shook his head. Alfred knew better than to pry. When Timothy was ready to open up to him, he would. Instead, Alfred turned his attention back to the house.

"You really should come and convalesce in the manor," Alfred said. "You're not going to get any better spending another night in this icebox."

"And spending a night in the same house as Damian will?" Tim raised an eyebrow at him. "I think I'd prefer spending a night in an actual meat locker."

"Now Timothy--"

Alfred was interrupted by the ringing of Tim’s phone. The young man motioned for Alfred to wait a moment. Tim’s face took on a serious expression as he saw what name had popped up on caller ID. “Yes, O?”

On the other end of the phone line, Barbara Gordon, otherwise known as Oracle, answered. “I know you’re supposed to be taking the night off, Red, but there’s a situation in your neck of the woods that could use your assistance if you’re up for it.”

“What’s going on?”

“There’s an apartment building on fire three blocks south of your location on the intersection of Snyder and Leifeld. Firefly was responsible for setting the blaze, and Robin is in the process of bringing him down. However, the firefighters on the scene need help rescuing tenants from the building. They’re having a hard time just keeping the flames from spreading to the surrounding neighborhood.”

Tim nodded, even though he knew Oracle wouldn’t be able to see him. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He ended the call and glanced over at Alfred, who was giving him a stern look full of disapproval and concern. The teenager shrugged. “Well, look at the bright side. At least I’ll be someplace warmer.”

*****

“Was there really no one else available?” Robin demanded of Oracle once he’d finished capturing the arsonist Firefly, and left him tied up and dangling from a light pole for the police.

“Beggars can’t be choosers, Robin.”

“When, exactly, did I beg?” the ten-year old vigilante asked with an unmistakable note of distaste in his voice.

“Cut the crap and get your butt back to the apartment building, Robin!” Oracle said with authority. “Red’s hellbent on getting one last child out of the building, but he’s having a hard time finding her. Get over there, find that child, and get out before that place comes down on your heads!”

“On my way,” Robin said, swallowing down the bitter feelings he usually held for his older brother. If an innocent life was in danger, especially a child, sibling rivalry had no choice but to take a back seat. He also did not want to be the one to explain to his father what happened to Red Robin if the idiot let himself get crushed by a structurally unsound burning building on his watch.

Inside the thirteenth floor of the burning building, Robin found his elder counterpart inside what used to be the living room of apartment number 1408. He was crouched as low as he could get under the thick black smoke filling the room, and he was in the middle of what looked like a bad coughing fit.

 _“Idiot!”_  Robin thought to himself, unable to voice the word himself because of the rebreather he had clutched in his mouth. He reached into his belt for a spare breathing device and moved quickly to Red Robin’s side. However, he paused in offering it to his brother when he saw that the teenager had one in the hand he wasn’t trying to stifle his coughs with. Red Robin noticed his younger brother between coughs and shook his head.

“Couldn’t breathe,” he choked out when the coughing fit subsided enough to give him his voice back.

Robin felt a tiny pang of sympathy as he recalled the earlier coughing fit he’d seen Tim have back at Wayne Tower that morning. Had his illness gotten worse over the course of the day? Before Damian could think any more on it, a flash of white in the smoky, flame laced environment caught both boys’ eyes.

“There! There she is!” Red Robin exclaimed as he dashed down a hallway towards what looked like bedrooms, forgetting even to put his rebreather back in his mouth in his hustle to rescue the child he’d been searching so hard for.

Robin tried to follow after him, but was suddenly cut off when a large chunk of burning ceiling fell down in the middle of the hallway, cutting him off completely. Looking around himself, it was clear that the building was about to come down. With a grimace, he gave the burning hallway one last parting glare before making a beeline for sliding glass door that led to the balcony. Once outside, he spat out his rebreather and looked around the side of the building for a window or ledge he could use to get to the room that Red Robin was in.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to make the effort to get back into the burning building. From the balcony, Robin watched as a bedroom window was broken out from the inside, and a familiar cowled figure fired a zipline at the rooftop of a nearby building that was a safe distance away from the doomed apartment building. With a small white bundle clutched to his chest, Red Robin made his way quickly out of the burning building, with his younger brother following not a moment after him.

*****

As soon as Tim’s feet touched the neighboring rooftop, far from the suffocating smoke and all consuming flames, he sank to his knees in relief, clutching the small child close to him. Her slender arms were wound tightly around his neck, and she seemed to hold as tightly to him as he did her. “It’s alright now,” he said in a gentle, comforting tone he always reserved for children as he stroked her long black hair. “You’re safe. I’ve got you.” Tim was so relieved to have saved this one last child from the doomed apartment building that he barely even registered Damian landing on the rooftop just a few yards in front of him. He did spare his adopted brother a moment to glance over him with his eyes, making sure visually that the boy was alright. Damian looked winded, and slightly singed around the edges, but he was still in one piece and didn’t appear to be injured.

“[Thank you, big brother.]”

Tim froze as he heard the softly spoken Japanese words, the relieved expression he’d been wearing slowly shifting to confusion. The voice... It seemed familiar, but it really shouldn’t have.

Something was wrong.

She was cold.

And wet?

None of the water from the fire engines below had reached the thirteenth floor where he’d been looking for the girl. The fire had also been so blazing hot that his cape was still radiating heat that it had absorbed while inside the building. And yet, the small girl in his arms felt as if she’d just been pulled out of an ice bath. Glancing down at the concrete rooftop beneath them, he noticed a dark puddle pooling beneath her bare feet, fed by the water dripping from the hem of her white dress.

A dress that suddenly reminded him of something he’d seen not too long ago.

It was about that point that Tim noticed more reminders that sent a sensation of dread settling uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach.

The feel of the child’s cold body against his, held in his arms just like this, was familiar.

The size of her body...

The weight of the child as he’d carried her in his arms...

The way her head rested against his neck just like that...

Tim felt ill. Really, really ill. Instead of coughing, though, he felt nauseous. A familiar, stomach-twisting odor clung to the girl, and he could feel the hint of bile rising to his throat. His chest was also starting to hurt.

Everything felt familiar, but the young man’s mind was firmly in denial.  _“It can’t be!”_  his thoughts screamed at him. But there was only one way to confirm the truth.

Tim gently, but quickly, pried the girl’s arms off of his neck. Then he held the child out at arm’s length and took a good hard look at her.

*****

Damian watched the entire exchange with a fair amount of befuddlement, once he’d caught his breath after escaping the burning building.  _“Why is Drake acting so strangely,”_  he wondered.  _“Does he know this kid?”_  Then, as Tim held the girl out at arm’s length, the boy had a flash of recognition.  _“It’s her!”_  he thought excitedly as he recognized the long black hair, white dress, and bare feet.  _“It’s the girl from this morning! I knew I’d seen her!”_

His excitement immediately turned to alarm when Red Robin made a startled exclamation and practically flung himself as far away from the girl as fast he possibly could! From his kneeling position, Tim stumbled backwards gracelessly, stopped only when his back met the roof’s high concrete ledge. Damian noted, with confusion, that Drake looked absolutely horrified.

He’d never seen an expression like that on Drake before, Damian thought to himself.

It made Damian uneasy, and when Damian felt uneasy he reflexively went for his blades, which, in this case, were a pair of well sharpened batarangs.

The tiny child, from behind, seemed quite undisturbed by Red Robin’s alarmed behavior and completely ignored the looming threat from the youngest Robin. She took a step towards Tim, which in turn caused the older boy to try and scramble away from her, though it was physically impossible. The heels of his boots scraped futilely against the concrete.

“[Why are you here?]” Tim managed to ask in a halting voice once he came to grips with the fact that he couldn’t move any farther away from her.

“[I don't want to be alone,]” she said with a sweet smile in her haunting voice as she moved even closer. “[I don't want to go to heaven alone.]” She reached out towards him with one hand. “[Please, come with me?]”

Tim’s face paled, and slowly he shook his head. “[No.]” He shied away from her outstretched hand.

“Red,” Damian finally raised his voice, and the child halted her advance. “What is going on here? Who is this girl?”

Slowly, the girl turned her head to look at who had spoken up. She turned to the physical limit of her pale slender neck. And then she turned passed it by another good fifteen degrees, the sound of her vertebrate grinding and popping immediately out of alignment raising an army of goosebumps on Damian’s skin. Only when he got a good look at the girl’s face did he see what had startled his older brother so badly.

Unlike the way she looked in the Tower earlier that day, this girl’s dark eyes were covered by a milky yellowish film. Her skin wasn’t just pale, but greying and green in blotchy spots from varying stages of decay. The long black hair that had seemed so neatly combed and trimmed earlier was dripping wet and clinging to her face and neck in long damp hanks. Her pale hands ended with fingers tipped in black, save for several digits where the flesh of the tips had eroded away to reveal the stark white tips of bone.

This was no five or six year old child.

This was a five or six year old walking corpse.

Whatever sweetness had been in her decayed expression towards Tim was quickly replaced by something far darker as her face twisted into something bitter and hateful as she glared at Damian.

“[Go away!]” she snapped. “[He's my big brother, now! You don't deserve him!]”

Suddenly, she twisted the rest of herself around and rushed towards Damian at an inhuman speed, her joints popping and crackling loudly in the process as a gruesome noise spilled out of her mouth. Despite himself, Damian flinched, eyes squeezing shut as he brought up his weapons defensively against the advancing onslaught.

“[Stop!]” Tim’s voice cut through the night air like a knife. “[Don't hurt him!]”

For a long moment afterward, there was nothing but silence.

No attack.

No yelling.

No growling.

No sickening bone popping.

The only sound Damian heard was his own heart thudding in his ears as he warily opened first one eye, then the other. He scanned the rooftop, trembling hands clutching his weapons tightly.

The corpse child was gone.

The only evidence that she had been there at all was a line of wet footprints that made a line from a very pale and shaken Tim to just a few feet away from Damian.

The boy sank to his knees, eyes unable to drag themselves away from where the wet footprints ended. “What... was that?” he stammered out with a shaky voice. Then he lifted his head to send his older brother a piercing glare. “Just what the hell was that?!”


	4. Last Resort

It didn’t take long for Tim and Damian to make their way to the rooftop of the elder brother’s home. Ideally, Damian wanted to just go straight home to the Cave, but (if he were being truly honest with himself) he didn’t think he could make the trip solo. After the encounter with the corpse child, he was shaking so badly that he actually fumbled his zip line before firing it off.

If Tim noticed, he didn’t say a word about it. It wasn’t as if he were in a much better state.

“Why is it so cold in here?” was the first thing Damian said once he and Tim had made their way from the roof into the house via one of several secret passages that had been built into the remodeled movie theater. It felt as if the temperature was hovering somewhere between forty and fifty degrees.

“The climate control's busted,” Tim replied simply, sparing a brief tilt of his head towards the gutted electronics he’d been working on earlier. While Damian examined the disemboweled thermostat with a bemused expression, Tim methodically removed his belts, cape, cowl, and gloves, draping all of them over the back of the sofa in his living room. Then he braced himself against the back of the sofa himself when the lingering smell of the corpse child on his gear hit him. A wave of nausea immediately roiled his stomach. He tried his best to resist the urge to empty the contents of his stomach. Before too long, though, he was in the downstairs bathroom doing exactly that. Afterward, he just sat there on the bathroom floor, resting his feverish head against the cool ceramic wall tiles. For the first time since he returned to Gotham, he was grateful for his home’s abnormal temperature fluctuations.

The sound of footsteps entering the bathroom drew Tim’s attention, and he eyed the proffered glass of water with a bit of surprise. He shifted his gaze to the boy holding the glass. Was that  _sympathy_  he saw on Damian’s face? Tim silently wrote off the bizarre observation as a product of delusions brought on by fever and stress before taking the water from Damian with a murmur of thanks.

Damian then took a seat on the floor in the corner of the bathroom closest to the door. Absent were elements of his own uniform, including his mask, gloves, belt, and cape. Silently he watched Tim take small, careful sips from the glass he'd given him. Once the glass was half empty and Tim looked steadier, he finally voiced the question that had been nagging at him since they got there.

“What's the connection between you and that... that girl?”

“Tokyo.”

The younger boy’s quizzical expression was rewarded with a brief synopsis of the case Tim had been helping Mr. Unknown with in Japan. He recounted the descent into the well and his unsettling discovery.

“The first body I found underwater was that of the girl,” Tim said. “I was practically on top of it when I finally got the spare flashlight. Then, I found her mother.”

Damian felt a lump rise up into his throat, but he tried to ignore it. “Murder-suicide?”

Tim shook his head. “Double murder. The mother’s second husband tried to kill both of them late last autumn, right before winter set in. He dumped them both in the well to hide the bodies, and convinced her family that she’d taken her daughter and run off with another man. Unknown and I found him and brought him down right before Tam and I came home.”

“Wait. What did you mean when you said ‘tried to kill both of them'? You just said it was a double murder.”

“The husband used blunt force trauma to try and kill them both. His wife was killed almost instantly from a blow that broke her neck. The girl... She got a blow to the skull, but the autopsy report said that wasn’t the cause of death.”

“Then what was?”

“Hypothermia.”

It took a moment for Damian to digest that bit of information. When everything fell into place, his eyes went wide with horror. “She was still alive when he dumped her in the well?!”

Tim nodded. “Don’t know for certain how long she survived down there. Even though it's the middle of summer, when I was in the well the water felt ice cold.” He shook his head a little before running his fingers through his hair. “I keep telling myself that she was probably unconscious. That she just slipped away in her sleep.” Clearly, though, Tim was doubtful of that theory. Timothy Drake-Wayne was a child soldier born in Gotham and trained by Bats and ninjas. Happy endings (even bittersweet endings) to things like homicide just didn’t compute naturally. Unfortunately, his brain was forcibly hardwired to lean toward the worst case scenarios in situations like these.

As Damian sat there, trying to wrap his head around everything he’d just been told, a part of himself wondered at the oddness of this situation. Prior to this night, he’d never set foot in his older brother’s new home in the remodeled movie theater so close to the site where his grandparents had been murdered and Batman had been born. Prior to this night, nearly every conversation between the two of them was laced with levels of hostility that ranged from " _politely passive-aggressive"_  to " _as subtle as a brick through a window"_. Now here he was having a sincere and serious conversation with Timothy while sitting on the floor of his bathroom.

From the other side of the bathroom, Tim chuckled wryly as he ran his hand over his face. “Good lord, this is so messed up.”

“What is?”

“Everything.”

The two of them said nothing more for a minute more before Damian finally broke the silence.

“I saw her at the Tower.”

Tim looked at Damian in confusion. “What?”

“She was there this morning at Wayne Tower,” Damian clarified. “Except she didn’t look like she did tonight. This morning she looked like an ordinary little girl, and she was following you around like a shadow.”

The older teenager paled. “But... I didn’t see...”

“She was there.” A sudden realization struck Damian. “She was there following you. She came after you tonight! She certainly seems to like you more than me. What did she say back there on the rooftop? What does she want?”

“You don’t speak Japanese?”

Damian shook his head.

Tim sighed. “She told me that she didn’t want to be alone.” He drew a knee up and held it close to his chest, his expression troubled. “She said that she didn’t want to go to heaven alone, and that she wanted me to go with her.”

“But... That would mean...”

Tim turned his gaze away from Damian. Then he sighed and rose to his feet, agitation clearly visible in his body language and tone of voice. “I need to make a call.”

“To whom?”

“To someone who knows how to deal with spirits, cause I certainly don’t have any ghost busting equipment in my utility belt, do you?” He stalked out of the bathroom and went back into the living room. “I suppose I could call Jason Blood. He still owes me a favor.”

Damian followed Tim out as the teenager went through his utility belt in search of his phone. “Wait. The immortal sorcerer owes you a favor?” he asked in disbelief.

Tim allowed himself a small, proud smile. “During my first year as Robin, one of the missions I worked with Bruce on involved helping Jason Blood with a problem he had with Klarion. The witch boy had managed to separate him from his demon, Etrigan. In the end, Jason and Etrigan were reunited, Klarion was  _grounded_ , and Jason owed both of us favors, though Bruce ended up cashing his in not too long afterwards.”

“So you’ve been hoarding a favor for all these years? Why?” Damian looked at his Tim curiously.

“Why?" Tim paused in his search to glance back at Damian incredulously. "Because a favor from a mystic as old and powerful as Jason Blood isn’t something to be spent lightly.” Tim finally found his phone and looked down at it thoughtfully. “Maybe, this still isn’t the right time to call in the favor...”

“Are you daft?!”

Tim shrugged. “There’s no guarantee he’ll know how to deal with this ghost. He’s a sorcerer, not an exorcist, and her being Asian might complicate things. Eastern beliefs on spirituality are very different from Western ones. Still, there are other mystics I could call on before him. Zatanna for one. She may not be as old or as powerful as Jason, but she’s very well connected. If she doesn’t have a solution, she’ll probably know someone who does.” His mind seemingly made up, Tim tried to turn on his phone to make the call, but nothing happened.

“What’s wrong?”

“My phone’s dead." Tim flipped the phone over in his hand before trying the on switch again. "That’s funny... I thought the battery was at least half charged.”

Damian made a derisive noise and went to fetch his own phone. He was about to say something snide about his brother’s negligence with his equipment when he found no response from his own phone. “Mine’s dead too.”

“Odd... Well, I have a landline phone. It's over here in the kitchen.” Tim went to the island separating the kitchen from the living room and stopped, a bewildered look on his face. “What the hell?” He stared at the empty phone base and drummed his fingers on the counter. “I know it was here before I left.” He gave an exasperated sigh. “Damian, I need your help.”

“Hm?”

“I’m gonna page the handset. Could you listen for it?”

The boy rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he muttered.

Tim pressed a button on the base. After a second, an insistent beeping could be heard in the otherwise silent house.

Both boys turned their heads upwards. It was coming from the second floor.

“How’d it get up there?” Tim wondered aloud.

“Doesn’t matter. Just wait till I get up there, then page the phone again,” Damian said as he ascended the stairs. Once he got to the second floor, Damian wrapped his arms about himself and rubbed his upper arms absent-mindedly. As cold as the house was downstairs, it felt a good ten degrees colder up there.

Then he heard the beeping again.

Damian followed the sound into what appeared to be the master bedroom. He turned on the light and looked around, but didn’t see anything that resembled the missing handset.

“Found it yet?” Tim called from downstairs.

“Almost!” Damian replied. “Page it one more time!”

A couple of seconds later, one more round of beeping could be heard, much closer this time than before. Damian followed the sound into the master bathroom. “There you are,” he grumbled as he stepped into the bathroom and flipped the light switch on. There, resting on the immaculately clean and otherwise barren countertop, was the elusive cordless phone.

Then, just as the boy was about to pick up the phone, the innocuous device suddenly began to ring, its volume setting at its highest level. The sudden sound startled Damian badly, and after scolding himself inwardly for being so jumpy, he picked up the phone and glanced at the caller ID screen.

“UNKNOWN CALLER”

The boy frowned, then hit the “Reject” button. That would send the caller directly to voice mail. If it was important, they’d leave Drake a message. Right now they had more important things to worry about.

However, not a second after Damian rejected the incoming call, the phone started ringing again right there in his hand. Not expecting the immediate callback and still edgy from the earlier events of the evening, the boy fumbled the phone for a moment without dropping it. Finally, with a sigh, Damian hit the “Accept” button and brought the phone to his ear.

“Hello. Drake residence.”

"[He’s my big brother.]"

Damian felt a chill race down his spine as chidlish Japanese words tumbled out of the phone receiver.

"[You’re in the way.]"

Suddenly, the bathroom door shut with an ominous slam that reverberated throughout the entire house.

*****

Tim had been halfway up the stairs when he heard the door slam. He froze on the steps. “Damian?!” he called out.

Immediately, he heard the sound of someone banging on a door upstairs. “Drake! Drake, get me out of here!” Damian yelled.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Tim raced to his bedroom. Immediately, he turned his focus to the closed bathroom door and tried to open it.

“Unlock the door, Damian!”

“It’s jammed! I can’t!”

Immediately Tim looked for the hinges, then cursed when he realized the door opened inward. “You'll need to take the hinges off the door from your side!”

“I left my belt downstairs!”

“Then improvise!” Tim snapped. “Use one of your boot daggers!”

“How do you know about those? Father doesn’t even know about those!”

Tim rolled his eyes. “Please. You’ve only tried to kill and/or maim me how many times? You think I’m NOT gonna keep track of how many deadly weapons you keep on you? And seriously... do you honestly think Bruce doesn’t know?”

From the other side of the door, Damian offered no snarky comeback. Instead, Tim listened as he heard the sound of a strong metal blade being used to try and pry the pins out of the hinges. The older teenager glanced at the open bedroom door. Their belts were downstairs. If worst came to worse, he an explosive charge from them to blow the door.

His thoughts were interrupted by sound of loud explosive pops from inside the bathroom, followed immediately by the sound of rushing water and a startled cry of alarm. “Damian! What’s happened?!”

“The faucets! The pipes! They’ve burst!” Damian shouted, unable to mask the alarm in his voice. “The bathroom’s filling with water!”

Looking down, Tim could see the carpeting in front of the bathroom door turning dark and soggy from the water seeping under it. “Shit!” Tim cursed. “Keep working on the hinges! I’m going for the belts!”

“Hurry!” Damian yelled.

Turning quickly, he rushed to leave the bedroom, only to be knocked flat on his back when the bedroom door was suddenly slammed shut on him. Tim sat up slowly, gingerly holding his aching head before staring at the closed door in alarm. “No,” he murmured before getting to his feet and trying to open the door. “No!” he repeated when the handle refused to budge. Desperately, he tried both driving his shoulder against the door and kicking it, but neither made a dent. He raked his fingers through his hair, gripping his black locks so tightly that it hurt. The door he was now trapped behind opened outward, which meant the hinges were on the other side. Then his eyes widened. He raced to his bed, reached under one of the massive pillows, and pulled out one of several throwing daggers he kept underneath it. Then he went to work dismantling the knob of the bedroom door himself. Tim managed to get the doorknob almost completely dismantled when he was suddenly plunged into darkness.

All the lights in the bedroom went out, and Tim froze. He glanced back to the bathroom door and saw no light from the gap in the top of the door either. Additionally, the sound of rushing water had stopped as well.

It was far too quiet.

“Damian?” Tim went to the bathroom door, his boots squelching as he walked over the soaked carpet. “Damian can you hear me?”

“Yeah.” The boy’s voice sounded raspy and breathless.

“What’s going on? What’s your status?”

Tim heard the sound of sloshing water, far higher than he would’ve expected behind the door. “T-t-totally d-d-dark,” Damian stammered through what sounded like chattering teeth. “Water’s up t-t-to my sh-shoulders.” Tim pressed his hands against the door, estimating Damian’s height and trying to determine how much water was in there. He swallowed hard. Even if the boy had managed to get the hinges off, the water pressure alone would hold the door firmly in place. Even working together, Tim wasn’t certain if they’d be able to force the bathroom door open. Even more troubling was the temperature of the door beneath his fingers.

“D-d-drake...” Damian stammered. “It’s c-c-cold. T-t-too--”

“I know,” Tim tried to reassure the boy. “Save your breath and your energy. One way or another, I’m getting you out.”

Then he heard a startled gasp, more sloshing water, and a thump that Tim could only assume was Damian forcing his back against the door. “What’s wrong?!”

Damian’s whispered voice sounded nervous and small. For the first time Tim could ever recall hearing, he sounded like a frightened ten-year old boy. “Something b-b-brushed my leg. Something’s in the w-w-water.”

“Stay calm, Damian,” Tim ordered firmly as he heard the panic rising in his younger brother’s voice.

“Can’t see. I can’t see--”

“Don’t panic!”

“Where is it? Where--”

Suddenly, Damian’s voice rose in volume and pitch as he screamed in alarm before the sound of wildly splashing water drowned that out completely! The sounds sent a spike of terror through Tim’s veins, and he banged against the bathroom door.

“Damian! DAMIAN!” he cried out as he struggled futilely against the door. But it was no use. Almost as if taunting him, he could feel the door handle twist easily in his grip, but when he tried to push it inward, he could feel the full weight of the water working against him. The wet carpet didn’t help matters either, as his boots got no purchase and slipped constantly beneath him as he tried to put his own weight against the door.

When the sound of splashing finally stopped, and an unsettling calm settled over the bathroom, Tim called for his brother again. “Damian! Damian, can you hear me?! Say something!”

Silence was his only response.

Tim felt his eyes begin to sting and his vision blur. His face wanted to settle into something grief-stricken, but he forced it to twist into something angrier. “[I know you’re here!]” Tim yelled out into the darkness. “[Show yourself, little sister!]”

He heard the sound of the wet carpet squelching behind him. Tim slowly turned his head to see the little Japanese girl meekly approaching him. She had a very human looking appearance, resembling what Damian had seen earlier that morning.

“[You’re mad at me?]”

“[Yes, I’m mad! Let him go! Bring him back!]”

“[He’s in the way! He’s hurt big brother! You said so! He’ll take you away from me!]” Tears filled the ghost girl’s deep dark eyes. “[He’ll take you away, just like Daddy took Mommy, and I’ll be alone again! I don’t want to be alone anymore!]” The little ghost... the little child... buried her face in her hands and curled in her herself, sobbing.

Tim felt a stab of guilt at upsetting this poor girl’s spirit. No matter what she’d done, at the heart of everything was the fact that she was just a small child who’d had her life ended in a violent and torturous fashion. He cast one last look at the bathroom door before bowing his head. Then he sighed and knelt down before the child. He reached out and gently placed a hand on her shoulder. She raised her eyes to him curiously.

“[If I go with you... Will you promise to let my little brother go?]” The teenager’s voice was heavy with resignation. “[If I go with you to heaven... Will you promise not to hurt him anymore?]”

The child’s whole face seemed to light up with delight. She smiled brightly and moved forward to wrap her arms around his neck in a tight hug. “[Yes! I promise! Thank you! I knew you were a good big brother!]”

*****

A minute later, the door to the bathroom forcibly burst open. The door itself fell flat onto the carpet as hundreds of gallons of ice cold water flooded into the bedroom, carrying with it a boy’s small unconscious body. He lay still for about a minute in an inch of standing water. Then Damian began to cough, spitting up water as he struggled to breathe. It took several tries, but he finally managed to prop himself up on trembling arms. He looked about himself in bewilderment, as if not quite realizing where he was.

“The bedroom?” Damian muttered when he finally got his bearings. Then he glanced at the now empty bathroom and shuddered. “Was it just a dream? A nightmare?”

As he tried to push himself into a sitting position, he winced. His hands hurt. Lifting them up to a sliver of moonlight cutting into the room, his eyes went wide and frightened as he saw the state of his hands.

They were red and raw. His fingertips especially were scraped up to hell, and he both could see and feel a large amount of algae and stone grit trapped beneath his nails.

Damian felt his stomach twist, and he couldn’t help but empty the contents of his stomach right there on the floor. Once that was done, and he felt a little steadier, he looked around.

Something was wrong.

Someone was missing.

“Drake?” He said, his voice hoarse from from having just thrown up. “Drake? Where are you?”

As he gave the bedroom one final sweep with his eyes, he felt his breath catch in his throat as he spotted a familiar form lying motionless on the floor.

“No,” Damian murmured. Unsteadily, he hurried over to Tim’s side. “Drake!” Immediately he felt for a pulse, and breathed a tiny sigh of relief when he felt it, before he realized how weak and thready it was. Timothy’s breathing was also far too shallow.

“Drake! Drake, wake up!” Damian said as he tried to shake Tim awake in desperation. Then a thought struck him and he looked from his brother to the bathroom. The boy’s hands trembled even as he shook his brother harder. “What did you do?! WHAT DID YOU DO?!”


	5. Reflections

In the end, it wasn’t his father or even Alfred Damian called for help once he realized that the landline phone had somehow escaped damage throughout the paranormal events of that evening.

The person Damian called when he realized Drake was slipping away was Dick.

“Tim?”

“Richard?”

“Damian?" The surprise in Dick's voice was apparent. "Is that you? Why are you calling from Tim’s house?”

“He... He won’t wake up.”

“What’s wrong, Dami? What happened?”

“He’s breathing, but he won’t wake up. His pulse... It’s too weak... Stupid. Stupid, stupid idiot... Help him, Richard! Please! Help him!”

Dick, as Nightwing, took no time at all in dropping the stakeout he’d been engaged in and making a beeline across the rooftops to Tim’s house. All the while, he stayed on the com link with his youngest brother, trying to keep him calm while attempting to make sense of the situation.

“What happened Dami? Tell me what happened to Tim?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know! It was dark... And the water was so cold...”

“Water?”

There was a pause. “Are you alive, Richard?”

“Dami--? What? Of course I’m alive. Listen, I’m just two minutes out. I’ll be there soon.”

There was another pause, and what sounded like footsteps through shallow water. It almost sounded like pacing. “She wanted him.”

“Who’s she?”

“The little girl.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Are you really alive?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

“ARE YOU ALIVE?!”

“Yes, Dami. I am. Just stay calm, alright? I promise, I’m almost there.”

From Tim’s bedroom, the hand holding the phone trembled badly. Damian choked back a sob. After everything that had happened, after all that he’d seen and felt, he honestly didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t anymore. He put his free hand up to his head, then winced when the barest touch sent a jolt of pain through him. Pulling his hand back, he saw his fingers wet and sticky with blood. Despite knowing that he needed to try and stay awake, the exhausted boy laid himself down on the cold water-logged floor, pillowing his head with one arm, and watched with blurring vision the shallow rise and fall of Timothy’s chest.

“Am I awake?” he asked in a small voice.

“What?” Dick asked on the other end of the line. The worry in his voice was obvious.

Damian’s eyes drifted closed. “Is this real, or is it just a nightmare?"

“Dami, you're scaring me. Are you hurt? Did you and Tim cross paths with Crane or Ivy tonight?”

“No... " Damian's mind felt foggy. "Just a little girl...”

*****

When Damian woke up, he found himself staring up at the ceiling of his bedroom back in Wayne Manor. He laid there for a solid minute, blinking slowly at the pattern in the tile above his head. Despite the light being cast by the lamp on his nightstand, it was dark enough within the room to assure him that it was still night outside. Then he gingerly sat up, noting with some curiosity that his uniform had been replaced by warm flannel pajamas and a electric blanket that had been placed over him while he slept. It was radiating a soothing heat that was a stark contrast to the bone numbing cold he last remembered feeling before he passed out.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

He felt infinitely better.

Then he looked down at his hands and saw how each of his fingers had been meticulously bandaged. Reaching up, he felt another bandage that had been placed on his forehead.

Damian's stomach twisted, just a little.

Carefully, the boy got to his feet. The clock under his lamp read 9pm, which didn't sound quite right. It should have been much later. What also didn't sound right was the amount of sound coming from the hallway. At this hour, his father should have been out on patrol, and Alfred should have been monitoring activity from the Cave.

Quietly, Damian opened his bedroom door and peered out into the hallway. He heard voices coming from two doors down, in the room that used to belong to Drake before he moved out. On bare feet, the boy crept closer to the room, stopping when he could clearly hear the conversation taking place within.

"Leslie, please--"

"I'm sorry Bruce, but I don't know what to say. This is unlike anything I've ever seen. I've run every test I could. There's no virus, bacteria, or toxin in his body. There's no sign of any visible injury or other identifiable type of disease. As far as I can see, it's as if Tim's body is just shutting itself down for no apparent reason." Damian could hear the weary sigh in Dr. Thompkins's voice. "If I were you, Bruce, I'd call in one of your Justice League specialists. Whatever Tim is suffering from, it's beyond the realm of everything I know of conventional medicine."

"How much time does he have, realistically?"

"At his current rate of decline?" There was a long pause. "Two days, maybe three... And that's only with the help of the machines and constant monitoring. Without that, honestly speaking, he wouldn't have twenty-four hours."

Damian felt a hot stinging in his eyes, and he leaned against the wall for support. He was so wrapped up in trying to process what he'd just heard that he didn't realize someone had come up to him until he felt a hand settle on his shoulder. The boy jumped under the strong grip with a gasp.

"Hey, it's ok, Dami. It's just me," Dick said in a reassuring tone. He tried to smile, but it was half-hearted at best. "Glad to see you're finally awake. We were afraid you might never wake up."

Damian just stared at Dick wide-eyed. It was a more than a little disconcerting, but before Dick could say anything about it, the boy practically tackled him, wrapping his arms tight around his waist and burying his face against the startled man's torso.

Dick stood there in shock for just a moment before wrapping his arms comfortingly around his younger brother. Though the boy gave no indication of crying, Dick could feel the smaller form shaking in his embrace.

"You're alive," Damian murmured.

Dick nodded. "Yes, I am."

Damian seemed to steady himself and turned his head, resting the uninjured side against Dick's chest. His face was somber and still unsettled, but much calmer now. "This is real, but Drake--" The boy interrupted himself and looked distraught. "He's still dying, isn't he?"

Dick stared at the boy in surprise. "Damian," he said gently as he knelt down to get to his youngest brother's level. "What happened last night?"

"Last night?"

"Yeah. You've been asleep for nearly twenty-three hours." Dick took a measured breath. "I found you and Tim upstairs in his bedroom at his home. The room had been flooded and both of you were unconscious and freezing cold. What happened before I got there? Was it Mr. Freeze or Scarecrow that did this to you two?"

Damian glanced downward. "No." His brow furrowed as he struggled to remember what exactly had happened. There were a number of disturbing mental images burned into his memory from the night before. However, here in the safety and security of Wayne Manor, with Dick in front of him and his father just a few rooms away, Damian was having a hard time separating what had been real from what had been a dream... Maybe it was all a dream?

It made his head hurt.

"Can I see him?"

"You mean Tim?"

Damian nodded.

"Of course," Dick said with a sad expression. As he led the way, he rested his hand on Damian's back. Then he opened the door to Tim's bedroom, letting out a slight waft of cool air into the warm hallway.

His father, Dr. Leslie Thompkins, and Alfred all turned to the sound of the door opening. An obvious measure of relief was present in each face, though Bruce's seemed to contain the most.

"What a relief," Leslie said as she immediately stepped up to examine Damian more closely. Before he could even think to voice a protest, she'd pulled out a pen light and was examining his pupils. "I didn't think he had the same ailment as Timothy, but I couldn't be certain until he woke up." Once she was content with the response of his pupils, she grabbed a thermometer from the nearby nightstand, put it into his mouth, and took his wrist so that she could take his pulse.

"How do you feel, Damian?" his father asked, after Leslie had finished with her impromptu exam. However, when he tried to step closer to his son, Damian shied away, watching his every move like a nervous animal. "Damian?" Bruce said with a perplexed look. "What's wrong?"

Damian tried to meet his father's gaze, but he just couldn't. He felt Dick's hands on his shoulders, trying to steady him. "Damian? Are you feeling alright?"

Before he could answer either one of them, movement and a flash of white from just behind all of them caught his eye.

"[It's you.]"

Damian froze. There, sharing the same bed as his mortally sick brother, was the corpse girl! She looked as she did to Damian that night on the rooftop, only now she was laying possessively on Drake with her head pillowed on his chest. As she met and held Damian's gaze, her rotting, skeletal fingertips curling slowly into Tim's blankets as rattling growl came slithering out of her mouth.

Then her milky eyes narrowed, and she smiled.

One of the machines next to Tim's bed began to give off a shrill alarm.

"The ventilator!" Leslie cried out in alarm as she rushed to Tim's bedside. The vital machine that was helping Tim to breathe suddenly malfunctioned! As soon as it seized up, Tim's unconscious form began to struggle to breathe. "Alfred! I need your help!"

The good doctor barely needed to ask before the butler was immediately by her side, quickly removing the now useless oxygen mask from Tim's face and replacing it with a mask connected to a manual ventilator.

As chaos erupted around him in the bedroom, and the attention of both his father and oldest brother turn squarely on Tim, Damian could not stay silent!

"Stop it! Leave him alone! Stop hurting him!" He turned to the backs of his father and Dick. "That ghost girl is responsible! Father! Richard! Don't you see her?!"

At least, that's what he attempted to say. Unfortunately, all that came out of his mouth was silence. Startled, Damian brought his hands to his mouth before they drifted down to his throat. Damian tried to speak again, practically screaming for both his father and eldest brother with the same voiceless result. Immediately, he looked for the ghost, but she was no longer on the bed.

Damian looked around wildly.  _"She's still in the room! She has to be!"_  he thought to himself. The ventilator was still malfunctioning, and the room felt like it was getting colder, though it seemed that Damian was the only one who noticed the sudden drop in temperature. The frantic boy turned around almost completely before doing a double-take in front of the full length mirror sitting innocently in one corner of the room.

His reflection looked strange.

Slowly, Damian approached the mirror, but only got a few steps before he froze in fear.

Everything in his reflection was normal, except for the pair of small, corpse-like child arms snaking around his head so that the rotting skeletal hands were covering his mouth.

Damian's breath began to come in short frightened gasps as he stepped backwards away from the mirror. His fear continued to mount as the world of his reflection began to quickly fill with water. His mirror self struggled to stay at the surface for air, but the room was filling far too fast. To his growing horror, Damian could see the more copies of the ghostly child hands pulling his struggling doppelganger down!

It was too much!

He couldn't stand it any longer!

Damian tore his eyes away from the mirror, whirled around, and bolted out of Tim's bedroom. He ran as fast as he could away from that room, away from her, not really caring where he ended up.

When he finally stopped to catch his breath, Damian found himself in the Cave, standing at the edge of one of the dark, seemingly bottomless chasms it contained. It was so tempting, the long descent. So inviting... All he had to do was take one step forward and his troubles would be over. He could go somewhere she couldn’t follow. She’d finally leave him alone.

He'd be free!


	6. Clarity

_“What will happen to Drake if you do this?”_

As Damian stood there, staring into the darkness of the drop off, a thought occurred to him and gave him pause.  _“I’m the only one who knows what’s really going on. If something happens to me, then Drake will die.”_

Slowly, Damian backed away from the edge. The first step took a great deal of effort. The desire to end everything in order to escape the torment of the corpse child was overwhelming, and to go against the fear driving it was mentally exhausting. Still, he managed to take that first step all on his own before hearing a familiar voice from behind him.

“Damian!" Worry lined Dick’s face as he slowly approached the boy. ”What are you doing?” He stopped a couple of yards away from Damian. ”What happened to you in Tim’s room?” The last thing Dick recalled of his little brother was noticing him starting at Tim’s mirror in terror, then bolting out of the room without a word to anyone.

“You didn’t see her, did you?” 

“Her?”

Damian took a slow, deep breath before glancing back at his brother. Then he glanced warily around the cave, as if expecting something or someone to come flying out of the shadows. Dick tried to follow Damian’s gaze, to see what he was looking for.

“Does anything in here seem off to you?” Damian asked suspiciously.

“Like what?”

The boy took another tentative step away from the edge. He set the toe of one foot carefully behind him, then rolled onto his heel as he shifted his weight backward onto it. Then Damian paused, his body clearly tensed, as if expecting some sort of attack. When nothing happened, he finally answered. ”Does the Cave seem colder?” Damian asked. ”Does any of the equipment down here look like it’s malfunctioning?” He glanced around, eyes darting at little things here and there. ”Does anything look out of place or missing?”

Dick looked around, clearly confused. “Everything seems normal,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Though I haven’t spent much time here since we brought you and Tim home.” He shook his head and looked at Damian pointedly. ”Now can you please explain what this is all about?!”

“She’s not here,” the boy declared softly. The tension visibly drained from Damian’s face and body, replaced with an expression of sheer relief. He wavered on his feet as his knees buckled beneath him, but was immediately caught by Dick before hitting the ground.

His older brother pulled him a good, safe distance away from the edge before finally breathing a sigh of relief himself. Dick held Damian so tightly that the boy could literally feel the fearful pounding of his heart within his broad chest.

“Now what the hell is going on?!” Dick demanded, while not showing the slightest interest in loosening his grip. ”What happened to you and Tim?! Why are you acting so odd?!”

“It’s a ghost!” Damian blurted out before he could second-guess himself. ”Drake got some evil soul-sucking poltergeist thing attached to him in Japan! That… That IDIOT unknowingly brought it home, and now it’s trying to kill him and drive me to… to…” Damian’s voice trailed off as an idea, a theory really, suddenly occurred to him. Here in the sanctuary of the Cave, in the safety and reassuring presence of his big brother, and without the presence of the corpse girl either visibly or invisibly, Gotham City’s current Robin felt as if he were finally able to think clearly.

“To what?” Dick echoed. “Dami?”

“Drake was investigating a rash of suicides in Tokyo,” he murmured thoughtfully, trying to remember everything he’d talked about with his Tim before the night had literally gone to hell. ”He said the victims all visited that well where he found the bodies, but he also said that they never figured out the cause of the suicides before he left.” He turned his head to look at Dick. ”Don’t you see?! It was her! She did it! That homicidal little walking corpse drove them to do it!”

“Damian,” Dick said with an odd expression. ”I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

The boy stared at Dick incredulously for a minute, then his expression faltered. “I always thought you and Drake were closer, but he really doesn’t talk to you or Father anymore, does he?”

The comment must have struck a raw nerve in the eldest Wayne son because Dick’s face grew pained and he loosened his hold on Damian, just a little. It was enough to let the boy worm his way out so he could rush over the the main computer and start pulling up files. Damian's frown deepened as he looked over the records of recent mission files for the past month. “He didn’t even file a report for what happened in Japan with the main database yet. Here’s Mr. Unknown’s, but Red Robin’s account doesn’t exist,” Damian muttered to no one in particular. “Was I really the first person in Gotham he told about this?” The boy wasn’t quite certain how that knowledge made him feel. “What else hasn’t he been making reports of?

Dick followed after Damian. The questions his youngest brother had posed were troubling to the elder, but he forced himself to remain focused on what was going on in the present. “What does this all have to do with a ghost? Are you saying that a spirit is making Tim sick?”

“More than responsible. The spook’s in there with him right now!” Damian said bitterly. Now that his head was clearer, and he wasn’t plagued with visions of death and drowning, he was getting angry. He had been letting the ghost of a six-year old child get the better of him, scare him nearly to death, and was draining the life out of someone who certainly deserved a better fate than what he was experiencing up in the mansion above their heads. He slammed his fist down on the metal computer console.

“Are you sure it’s an actual ghost here in the manor, Damian?”

It wasn’t the question itself that ruffled Damian’s feathers so much as the skeptical tone of Dick’s voice as he posed it. “Am I sure? Are you doubting me?”

“No, of course not, Dami, but--”

Damian raised an eyebrow. “Wait? Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who don’t believe in ghosts!”

“Of course not.”

“Then what?!”

“Because the Cave and manor have protections in place to keep those kinds of things out.”

Damian felt his frustration bleed off a little. “Protections?”

Dick nodded and laid a hand on Damian’s shoulder. “It’s not that I doubt you, Dami,” he said reassuringly. “A few years back, Bruce helped out the sorcerer Jason Blood with a problem he was having. In return, he had Blood set up safeguards around the Cave and manor to keep mystics and paranormal things from coming in and causing trouble. If I remember correctly, that included ghosts too.”

Blood’s name sparked a memory for Damian almost immediately.

_“There’s no guarantee he’ll know how to deal with this ghost. He’s not an exorcist, and her being Asian might complicate things. Eastern views on spirituality are very different from Western ones.”_

Immediately, Damian set to work pulling up contact information on the computer on all active and reserved Justice League members.

“What are you looking for?”

“I’m looking for contact information for Zatanna Zatara,” Damian answered briskly. Then a thought struck him and he whipped his head around to look at Dick. “Do you have her number on your phone?”

Dick absentmindedly pulled his cell out of his back pocket. “Yeah, but why— HEY!”

He never got a chance to finish his question. Damian snatched the phone as soon as it was within reach and went zooming through his contacts until he found the number he needed. He paced impatiently as he waited for the person to pick up on the other end of the line.

“Dami?”

“Shh!”

“Damian!”

“Will you shut up?! I’m trying to liste—”

“Hello? Dick? Is that you?” A woman’s voice came out of the phone’s receiver.

Damian gave his brother a parting  _“shut up now”_  glare before turning his full attention back to the phone. “No. This is Damian Wayne. Is this Zatanna Zatara?”

“Yes. This is she. What is this about? Is something wrong with Dick?”

“This isn't about Grayson,” Damian clarified. “This is about Drake. A ghost is haunting him or possessing him or something! It’s killing him, but last night he mentioned that you or someone you know could help get rid of it!”

A strange man’s voice joined Zatanna’s on the phone. “I told you, Zanna. I had a feeling you’d need my help today.”

“Ugh!” Zatanna made an irritated noise. “I hate it when your ‘feelings’ involve me, John.”

“You just hate how smug I get when I’m right.”

“That too.”

“Zatanna? Who is that?”

“Gimme the phone, Zanna dear.” There was a brief shuffle and the man’s voice was suddenly louder in Damian’s ear. “Hello, Damian,” the man said in a thickly British voice. “Lovely name by the way. One of my favorite movie characters shares that name. Regardless, my name is John Constantine, and I believe you are in need not of Miss Zatara’s help, but of mine.”

“Constantine? Who are you? How can you help?”

“Because, dear boy, I am a very well versed, well traveled supernatural detective. And I have a feeling that I may have a possible solution to the rather trying problem you have set before you and your family.”

Damian’s was curious, but skeptical. “You think you can help us based off a feeling?”

“Vision actually,” Constantine clarified. “Premonition to be more precise.”

“Really?”

“In my vision, I have seen a girl,” Constantine said briskly. “Small female child. Asian in nationality. Wearing white.” He paused, then added with a morbid note of amusement, “And she seems to have this disturbing fixation with trying to drown a surly, dark haired boy of maybe ten or twelve and mixed racial heritage.” He paused again. “Am I close? Can we stop wasting each others’ time now and get down to work?”

Back in the cave, Damian paled. He’d been holding the phone far enough from his ear that Dick could hear every word uttered by the man on the other line. To make things easier, Dick took the phone and put it on speaker. “I need to talk to Zatanna,” he demanded.

“The phone’s on speaker, Dick.”

“Something is very wrong and Tim is dying. If a ghost is really responsible for this, do you trust this Constantine and his ability to help us?”

There was barely any hesitation on Zatanna’s part. “John may be an arrogant ass, but that’s because he’s right more often than not in matters like these, and he knows it. I’ve worked alongside him, and I trust his skills.”

Damian sighed. “What do we need to do?”

“I need to be there to diagnose the situation. Shouldn’t take too long. Zanna can teleport me there—”

Dick shook his head. “Not gonna happen.”

Zatanna clarified the situation herself. “There are wards set by Jason Blood shielding Wayne Manor, John. Nothing paranormal and no one mystic can set foot or cast magic anywhere near that place without expressed verbal permission from Bruce Wayne himself.”

“We’ll need to show Bruce proof positive that a ghost is there,” Dick said. “Frankly, I’m still not entirely certain myself…”

“Richard!”

“I know what you believe you see, Damian,” Dick reasoned. “But remember this is Gotham, and the Scarecrow and Poison Ivy are both currently at large. This whole situation could easily by something brought on by a new batch of toxic chemicals or plants from either one of them.”

There was a slightly exasperated sigh from Constantine. “Damian. Do you have a pet? A cat would be best, but dog or a bird would work in a pinch…”

Damian shared a confused look with Dick. “I have a dog. A dane named—”

“Names and breeds don’t matter,” Constantine interrupted. “Just take the dog to Timothy’s room. Take the dog as far in as you can, right up to the bed if possible, and keep this phone on speaker so I can hear everything that happens.”

“Alright.” Damian turned to Dick. “Where’s Titus?”

“He’s out back,” Dick said. “Leslie’s allergic to dogs, so Alfred put him outside while she’s treating Tim.”

Damian barely waited for Dick to finish his statement before racing towards the stairwell. It didn’t take long for the two to make their way back into the manor from the cave. A quick whistle was all it took to get Titus racing back inside, and the younger boy hustled the black Great Dane up to Timothy’s room, outpacing Dick as he hurried upstairs.

“Damian? What are you doing with Titus?” Alfred asked as he narrowly avoided colliding with the exuberant dog.

Leslie and Bruce had just stepped out of the bedroom when the woman recoiled from Titus. “Oh dear! Damian, please keep him away. I’m horribly allergic to dogs.”

“Damian,” Bruce said sternly. “Please take Titus back outside. He doesn’t need to be in here right now.”

The boy ignored each and every one of them. “Go to Drake!” he ordered the dog, pointing at the open door. “Go! Now!”

“Damian!” Bruce exclaimed. “What are you doing?!” An irritated look crossed his face at being so blatantly disobeyed by his youngest son. “Take Titus downstairs and back outside now!”

“No wait, Bruce!” Dick said as he finally caught up. He, like Damian, was watching Titus with great concern. “Something’s wrong.”

All eyes turned to Titus.

Despite being ordered to go straight to Tim, the large black dog stopped right at doorway and refused to set one paw into the room itself. His ears were perked forward, and his nostrils flared a few times as he took a couple of experimental sniffs.

Then, to everyone else’s surprise except Damian’s, the Great Dane lowered his head, laid his ears flat, and began to growl in a very menacing fashion. Soft white vapor from the dog’s breath slipped past Titus’s gleaming white exposed fangs into the quickly cooling hallway.

“Titus?” Uncertainty colored Bruce’s tone before his eyes fell on his youngest son. “Damian. What’s going on?”

Damian’s eyes weren’t on the dog anymore, though. The boy was staring into the room, staring at Timothy’s bed. He was pale, and though he was trying to maintain a calm, grim visage, the hand gripping Dick’s cell phone was trembling. Behind him, he heard a gasp from his older brother.

“Do you see her now?” Damian said through gritted teeth. “I told you she was there!”

Gasps and cries of alarm came from both Alfred and Leslie. Bruce turned his attention to Tim’s room and felt his blood run cold.

His son… His dying son… Was not alone on the bed.

A little girl… A little decaying corpse girl with milky dead eyes and a stained white dress… was draped possessively over Tim’s chest, glaring balefully at Damian.

“[Go away!]” the dead girl hissed.

Though he didn’t understand what she said in Japanese, Damian snapped back immediately, anger and frustration lacing every syllable. “Leave him alone!” He tried to storm into the room. He was sick and tired of all this crap and he wanted to settle things once and for all!

“Don’t cross the threshold!” Constantine’s voice warned immediately from the phone. But the warning came too late. Before anyone could stop him, he moved forward and set one foot into Tim’s room. Instantly, that same bone popping grinding noise he’d heard on the rooftop just the other night filled the air, and Damian froze in terror as the girl began to disturbingly stalk over Timothy’s body, pulling her limbs into an unnatural, inhuman crouch, as if preparing to pounce.

Then suddenly she rushed forward, closing the distance between Tim’s bed and Damian in the blink of an eye. Before Damian could even react to the fact that she was mere inches away from his face, the boy felt sharp teeth pierce his arm and pull him forcibly out of the room and into the hallway. He fell hard and the phone went skittering, and Damian heard the sound of the bedroom door slamming shut. 

There was a horrible commotion as the grownups around him began to talk all at once and try, unsuccessfully, to get back into Tim’s room. Damian tried his best not to show how shaken he was. Fortunately, Titus hovered over his small master, and as the massive dog licked the fresh wounds on Damian’s arm apologetically, the boy stroked the dane’s short coarse fur.

From the phone on the floor, a lone calm voice finally cut through the cacophony in the hallway.

“Mr. Wayne,” the British accented voice started. “My name is John Constantine, and I believe you are in need of my assistance.”


	7. Revelations

"No! Damian, behind you!" Dick yelled in alarm.

However, his youngest brother didn't show any sign of acknowledgement. Damian's attention was resting solely on the cordless phone in his hand as he stood in Tim's master bathroom and pressed a button to disconnect the incoming call. What Dick saw that he didn't, however, was the creepy image of the decaying corpse girl reflected in the mirror right behind him.

"He can't hear you," John Constantine said calmly from Dick's left side. "As I said before, we are merely observing Damian's memories from the previous evening. Nothing we say or do can affect what your brother is experiencing."

An hour earlier, Bruce Wayne had given reluctant permission for Zatanna to teleport John Constantine into Wayne Manor. Although he was always wary about magic users, especially those who professed to be "allies", there were precious few options at his disposal when it came to Tim's mysteriously failing health in conjunction with the revelation of the disturbing corpse girl spirit haunting him.

After a brief conversation, it had been decided that the quickest way to get a clear grasp of the situation was to explore Damian's memories from the previous night, before Dick found his brothers passed out in Tim's bedroom. Though markedly reluctant to relive his experiences, Damian agreed to reveal them to Constantine. Though the boy protested against their presence, Dick and Bruce insisted on observing Damian's memories as well, both of them adamant about not leaving the strange paranormal investigator alone in the young boy's mind.

Already, they had seen the events both at the burning apartment building and at the rooftop adjacent it. It made Dick's skin crawl to see his brothers practically helpless against the machinations of the small malevolent spirit. At the corpse girl's Japanese speech, Bruce's eyes narrowed while Constantine raised a curious eyebrow. Though he wasn't fluent in Japanese like Bruce, Dick knew enough to catch a basic gist of the conversations between Tim and the creepy child.

While observing the scene in Tim's house, specifically following Damian as he searched for Tim's missing phone. Dick smelled the paranormal trap coming a mile away, the moment his brothers noticed the missing phone.  If it had been within his power, he would've dragged both his brothers out of that house as fast as he could.

But he couldn't.

All he could do was watch.

When the phone rang loudly and unexpectedly the second time, Damian fumbled the phone badly, nearly dropping it before grabbing it securely with both hands. Then he decided to answer it and brought the handset up to his ear.

The ominous words were spoken by the girl.

Then the bathroom door slammed shut!

Damian's eyes widened when he realized the door had closed on its own. The phone was dropped, utterly forgotten, before he rushed over and tried to open the door, with no success. The doorknob turned smoothly in his grip, as if teasing Damian despite the fact that the door itself refused to budge an inch, no matter how much force he pushed against it.

"Damian!" Tim's voice came from the other side of the door.

Constantine, Bruce, and Dick watched the exchange between Damian and Tim from the youngest boy's perspective trapped in the bathroom. While Bruce and Dick were more focused on Damian and his attempts to free himself by prying loose the pins in the door hinges, Constantine's focus was on the mirror and the rest of the bathroom itself. It was as if he were watching something that the others could not see.

He was the only one in the room not surprised when the faucets in the bathroom began to burst violently from their fixtures.

Damian cried out with alarm despite himself. He narrowly dodged a metal faucet handle that came flying at his head and shattered the ceramic tiles behind him. The boy's alarm grew visibly as he realized how quickly the bathroom was filling with water.

"What's going on?" Bruce demanded as he glared at Constantine.

"The spirit clearly does not like your youngest," Constantine said matter-of-factly.

"But why?!" Bruce asked. "Damian's done nothing to her!"

"Not sure, yet," Constantine answered. "But I think we're on the right path."

Any other questions Bruce wanted to growl out were interrupted by the sudden loss of light. Everything had gone pitch black and deathly quiet, save for the sound of Damian's ragged breathing and water sloshing. Bruce and Dick strained to see anything, but the effort was futile.

*****

The flash of light was almost too bright, and it took a minute for everyone's eyes to adjust. Soon as they were able to see, it became clear that they weren't in the bathroom anymore.

"How intriguing," Constantine remarked, though Bruce and Dick were less than interested in what he had to say at the moment. Both men were alarmed to see that Damian was barely treading water at the bottom of what looked like a very old, very deep well. The boy looked disoriented, blood from a vicious head wound dripping down into one eye as he tried to get his bearings.

Damian tried to rub the blood from his eye, but it didn't seem to help much. Then he looked straight at his eldest brother, and a panicked look crossed the boy's face.

"Richard?!"

Dick's eyes widened. "Dami? Do you see me now?" He opened his arms wide as the boy moved toward him, and gasped when Damian passed right through him. He turned around and felt his blood run cold.

Behind him, at the far side of the well, Dick saw his own body floating face down in the water.

"Richard!" Damian cried out, fear laced his voice as tears filled his eyes. "Richard, please be alright!" With shaking hands, Damian turned Dick's body over and gasped when his elder brother's dead, sightly eyes gazed back at him.

"No," Damian murmured breathlessly, his voice small and tears welling up in his eyes. "No, you can't be dead. You can't!" He tried shake Dick's doppelganger, then desperately tried to feel for a pulse, but pulled his hands back after a moment, backing away slowly.

From his vantage point, Bruce could see that his eldest son's dead doppelganger had a broken neck and head trauma similar to what Damian was suffering in this increasingly disturbing vision. Unable to stare at the sight any longer, Bruce turned his attention to his youngest. It was only then that he noticed that Damian wasn't looking at Dick's body anymore.

His eyes were turned upward.

"Father?"

Everyone else looked up to the mouth of the well. Above them, framed by a circle of gray sky, was Bruce... Or rather, his own doppelganger. Unlike Dick's double, floating dead within the well water with Damian, Bruce's was alive and well, staring down at his son.

"Father!" Damian called out, clearly relieved to see him. Then, as a long moment of silence filled the space between them, relief was slowly replaced by confusion.

"Father?"

Bruce's double silently moved out of the circular frame. Then, the circle began to shrink, another black circle moving in to eclipse the sky, ugly scraping noises filling the air of the well. It took a moment, but Bruce suddenly realized what was happening.

A lid, probably made of wood, was being pushed over the mouth of the well.

"No!" Damian cried in terror, his voice echoing back at him. "Father, stop it! Father! Don't leave me, please!" Desperately, Damian clawed at the edges of the well, trying his best to climb up the sides of the rounded stone walls.

With their hearts in their throats, Bruce and Dick could only watch helplessly as Damian got barely a quarter of the way up the well before the slick algae coating the smooth stones thwarted the boy's attempt to escape. Damian lost his grip and with a shriek fell backwards into the well, hitting the cold water with a resounding splash. Damian resurface, coughing and sputtering just in time to see the last of the light, the last of the grey sky, disappear into the black.

Swallowed up by the darkness, Bruce and Dick could only stand helpless as they listened to Damian struggle with the situation. For several minutes, they heard him attempt to climb up the walls again, but with far less success than before. Dick felt his heart clench as he listened to the sound of his brother's nails and boots scraping against the stones as he slid down them for the umpteenth time. Bruce felt his stomach twist into knots as, alone in the dark with his "dead" brother's body for company, his youngest son began to give in to the concept of dying cold and alone in this small dark place. The struggling had stopped, and for what felt like long, agonizing hours, all that could be heard were Damian's shallow, weakening breaths.

_"[...I know you’re here... Show yourself, little sister...]"_

Very faintly, as if coming from someplace very far away, Tim's voice, speaking in Japanese, could be heard through the darkness.

_“[You’re mad at me?]”_  a small girl's voice whispered back.

_“[Yes, I’m mad!]"_  Tim's voice was louder now, desperate and angry.  _"[Let him go! Bring him back!]”_

"Drake?" Damian's voice was weak, but in the dark it seemed that even he could hear Tim's voice as well as the others. The water sloshed around in the well around the edges, as if Damian was searching for the source of the voices. "Drake? Where are you? _"_

_“[He’s in the way! He’s hurt big brother! You said so! He’ll take you away from me! He’ll take you away, just like Daddy took Mommy, and I’ll be alone again! I don’t want to be alone anymore!]”_

A girl's sobbing filled the well, echoing off the rounded walls. Then, after the sobs had faded into silence, Tim's voice spoke out, more subdued.

More resigned.

_“[If I go with you... Will you promise to let my little brother go?... If I go with you to heaven... Will you promise not to hurt him anymore?]”_

_“[Yes! I promise! Thank you! I knew you were a good big brother!]”_

_*****  
_

Suddenly, there was a flash of light, and everyone was back in the Cave beneath Wayne Manor.

"Damian!" Dick cried out. He rushed for his little brother, who had nearly fallen to the floor, pale and unconscious. Dick caught him and cradled him close.

As Dick, Alfred, and Leslie hovered over Damian as he slowly regained consciousness, Bruce whirled on both Constantine, anger flashing in his blue eyes.

"What the hell was that?!" he demanded. "What did that ghost do to my sons?!"

"It appears that the Onryo forced your youngest to experience the event of her own death," Constantine said as he tapped out a cigarette from a half-empty pack he drew from his coat pocket.

"Onryo?"

Constantine almost lit up his cigarette, but at the disapproving glare from Dr. Thompkins, he pocketed his lighter with a sigh. "The ghost is an Onryo, a vengeful Japanese poltergeist. They're usually created when a person dies under emotionally traumatic circumstances at the hands of someone they love. The Onryo curses the place where they died, in this case that well, and anyone with the misfortune of encountering them suffers their wrath."

"I don't understand," Bruce said. "Why is this Onryo attacking Tim and Damian? They had nothing to do with her death, and from what I understand, Tim found her body and has gotten justice for her murder before leaving Japan."

"Typically, an Onryo doesn't care about revenge or justice," Constantine explained. "Unlike most vengeful western spirits, they're not really appeased if the crime that caused their death is brought to light. The Onryo is a cursed spirit who normally cannot move past the negative emotional state brought on by their cause of death. This one seems different, though"

"How so?"

"This one has attached itself to Timothy. It could be because of her age, or it could be because he did solve her crime, but she regained enough sense of self to desire to move into the next world. Unfortunately, she doesn't want to go alone. She claims him as her 'big brother' and wants him to go with her. Her hostility towards Damian seems to stem from the knowledge of knowing that he's threatened Tim's life in the past. When she was alive, she couldn't protect her mother, who had been murdered by her stepfather and was found in that well, from what Mr. Unknown's report had said. However, as an Onryo, she knows she is powerful enough to kill, so she's being protective of Tim and sees Damian as a threat."

A contemplative look crossed Constantine's face.

"What's wrong?" Bruce asked.

"Something's not right," he murmured. "Tim had agreed, quite plainly, to go with the girl to heaven in exchange for Damian's life. However, both the Onryo is still here, and Tim is still alive. If everything had taken place as Damian recalled, then both Tim and the Onryo should be gone."

Constantine looked somewhat annoyed. "We're missing information." He sighed. "And there's only one place to get what we need." He turned towards the stairs leading up to the manor, slipping his unlit cigarette between hislips. "When your youngest is coherent, you can find me in the guest room adjacent to Timothy's."

"Where are you going?"

"To speak with Timothy himself."


	8. Complications

John Constantine wasn't expecting to be interrupted as he settled himself on the bed in the guest room adjacent to the one occupied by Timothy Drake and the corpse girl. However, before he had a chance to settle himself into a trance and slip into the astral plane, the sound of the bedroom door opening interrupted his meditation.

"I want to go with you," a pale Damian Wayne said as he leaned against the door frame for support.

Constantine looked at the boy with quizzically raised eyebrow. "I'm surprised to see you recovered so quickly," he admitted. "Those were some fairly traumatic memories, even for one in your line of work."

Damian ignored Constantine's commentary, choosing instead to step into the room fully, shutting the door behind him. "You're going to talk to Drake somehow, right? I want to go with you."

"Where's your father and older brother?"

"They think I've gone to the bathroom," Damian said dismissively. "Can you take me with you or not?"

"I could, but why do you want to go?"

The boy's demanding expression faltered, and he looked uncomfortably uncertain. "I need to see him," he said in a quiet voice. "I need to know why..."

"Why what?'

Damian sighed. "Why he sacrificed himself to save me."

Constantine studied Damian for a long moment, then nodded and motioned to spot on the bed in front of him. "Take a seat," he said invitingly. As the boy sat down cross-legged in front of him, the older man set down some ground rules. "Since going into your brother's bedroom physically isn't possible at the moment, the only other way to reach him will be through the astral plane. I can allow you to follow, but you need to be as your father and brother were while viewing your memories. You must remain unseen and unheard. This is necessary, since the Onryo is especially hostile towards you. You will have far less protection against her in the spirit realm than in the physical. Do you understand?"

Damian nodded.

***

The spirit realm was eerie to Damian. At first, it looked just like the interior of Wayne Manor, except that everything was shrouded in a thick fog that made it hard to see more than a yard or two ahead of him in any direction. He could hear things beyond the fog, though. They were strange, unrecognizable sounds that made the boy's skin crawl.

"Hm. So this is how you picture yourself? Interesting."

Damian noticed Constantine studying him curiously. Only then did he realize that something was different about him. Rather than looking up to meet the paranormal investigator's gaze, he noticed that he was comfortably staring him eye to eye without inclining his head. Then he chanced a glance at a mirror.

The person reflected back at him was not the ten-year old boy he was accustomed to seeing. Here in the astral plane, Damian appeared now far older. He was a young man, maybe about Dick's age, and looked remarkably like his father save for a slimmer physique and more olive skin tone. He was also wearing a modified version of his father's uniform. The cowl was the same, but rather than a cape, he wore a long, high collared black trenchcoat over body armor studded with metal plates and emblazoned across the chest with a large red bat symbol. He also noted, with a non-visible eyebrow lift, that the black gloves he wore were sporting red fingerstripes that seemed to extend up his arm under his coat sleeves.

"What is this?" he asked, his voice deeper and sounding strange in his own ears. "Why do I look like this?"

"This is the astral plane," Constantine explained. "We appear how we believe we should be in our mind's eye. Our own perceptions of ourselves can influence our appearances here."

"Then why do you look the same?" Damian asked as he gave his traveling companion a once over.

Constantine shrugged. "I am what I am and that's all that I am." He then lit up a cigarette and relished the long drag he was finally able to take. "Come on. Let's find Timothy. The less time we spend here the better."

"Worried about him?"

"Worried about me."

At Damian's questioning look, Constantine shrugged. "I happen to suffer exactly the wrong kind of notoriety here in this realm. Last thing we need are some of my own personal demons joining the party." He took another drag and exhaled slowly, the tendrils of smoke swirling out to join the fog that engulfed them. "As bad as the Onryo is, she's small fry compared to some of the others I know out here. That doesn't make her any less dangerous to your brother, you, or anyone else in this house, but you need to remember that there are always worse things lurking beyond the veil. So let's be quick about this, shall we?"

Stepping out of the bedroom led the two men into a fog filled hallway. The first thing Damian noticed was Constantine. Although the older man tried to give off the air of casual indifference, there was a watchful tension in every step he took. Though the hallway was mostly quiet, Damian could hear faint sounds of  _things_  moving just beyond his sight. It made him itch to send a batarang into the fog, but a look from Constantine stilled his hand.

For now, at least, they remained undisturbed.

It was a short walk to Tim's bedroom door. As the two of them stood before the door, all was quiet. Constantine stared at the wooden barrier until the remainder of his cigarette burned down straight to the filter, leaving a small column of ash on the end of it. Then he sighed and removed the cigarette from between his lips. To Damian's curiosity, Constantine then tapped the ash from the cigarette butt into the palm of his other hand.

"Hey!" Damian exclaimed in protest as Constantine used his finger to smear some of the ash onto his forehead. "What are you doing?"

"Drawing a ward to mask your presence," the older man explained as he finished the symbol on Damian's forehead. "This will keep you from being seen by anyone here on the astral plane, save for myself." Then he moved to draw another symbol on Damian's chest. "However, in order for this ward to work, from this point on you must not utter a single sound." He looked at Damian with an expression of grave seriousness. "If you break your silence, you'll shatter the ward, and I cannot guarantee your continued existence if the Onryo chooses to attack you here. Understand?"

Damian nodded.

"Good." The symbols finished, Constantine turned to the door. "Let's get this over with."

***

The first startling thing that struck Damian when the door to Tim's bedroom was opened was the wave of heat that buffeted his face. It was like opening the door to a sauna. When the smoke cleared and Damian could finally get a good look inside, his jaw nearly dropped at the sight.

Although everything else in this astral plane had resembled a carbon copy of Wayne Manor, there was nothing of his father's home present in his older brother's room. Where Tim's bedroom should have been was a dense forest on fire. Trees were burning all around him, the flames the only light in an otherwise pitch black night.

Once he stepped through, Damian heard the door slam shut behind him. He whirled about and was unsettled to see that the bedroom door had disappeared, as if it had never existed in the first place.

Then he heard a strange sound. It sounded like metal scraping on stone, and it was coming from deeper in the forest. Damian opened his mouth to ask Constantine what was going on, but stopped when the older man shook his head with a stern glare. The boy now in a man's body remembered the earlier warning and closed his mouth without saying a word. Instead, he just followed as Constantine carefully made his way through the maze of trees.

When they reached a clearing in the forest, the sight before them made Damian's heart drop into the pit of his stomach.

In the clearing was what looked like an old stone well. It's wooden lid was in splinters scattered upon the ground, some of the larger pieces smoldering or on fire. The scraping noises he'd heard earlier were being made by thick metal chains that had snaked their way out of the well and were dragging across the stones.

Tangled up on the other end of those chains was Tim.

Though crouched on the ground and bound in the chains, it was clear Tim was wearing a modified version of his Red Robin costume. Gone was the cowl, replaced by simple domino mask. Missing also were his bandoliers that usually crossed his chest. Instead, the body of his costume heavily resembled Dick's Nightwing uniform, right down to the fingerstripes in crimson instead of blue.

Then something white stirred in Tim's arms.

"Well isn't this an interesting sight," Constantine said as he walked up to Tim, eyes scanning the clearing warily. Damian hung back, not wanting to draw attention to himself, despite the fact that he was supposed to invisible to everyone else except for his guide.

Tim raised his head slowly and turned to look at Constantine. When he spoke, there was a bone-deep exhaustion in his voice. "You-- You're John Constantine?"

Constantine raised an eyebrow. "My reputation precedes me?"

"I've read your file."

"Batman has a file on me?"

Tim managed a weak smirk. "Who doesn't Batman have a file on?" Then the smile faded, replaced by concern. "Do you-- Do you know--"

"Know?"

"Is Robin-- Is Damian alright?"

Constantine nodded. "It's because of him that I'm here."

The relief was unquestionable on Tim's face. "I'm glad," he murmured as he bowed his head.

Constantine moved around Tim to get a better look at the well, following the chains back to their source.

"So what went wrong, Timothy?" he asked. "Why are you and the girl still here?"

Much to Damian's alarm and surprise, he finally got a good look at why Tim was crouched on the ground. His older brother was protectively wrapped around the body of the Onryo. She resembled her human form, looking just like a living child instead of a decaying corpse girl. The chains that Tim was tangled up in were also tied to her as well. She looked terrified and clung desperately to Tim.

"[I'm sorry. I'm sorry.]" she repeated in a small voice over and over again, to which Tim shushed her gently and held her more closely.

"The deal was to trade Damian's life for mine, so that I could take Minako to heaven."

"Minako?"

Tim nodded. "That's her name. This is Minako." He gazed down at the girl sadly. "But heaven isn't where she's going." His eyes shifted towards the well.

Constantine's eyes narrowed. "You know the deal is null and void now, right?" he remarked. "Since clearly the little demon child is destined for hell, the contract you made with her is no longer binding. All you have to do is let go of her, and you'll be free to return to your body, which is barely clinging to life as it is."

Tim stared aghast at Constantine, before glaring back at him with a fierce determination. "Absolutely not!"

This reaction clearly caught Constantine off guard. "Excuse me?"

"I'm not dooming Minako to hell!" Tim snapped, pulling the child closer to him.

"Be reasonable," Constantine muttered. "The child may have died an innocent, but as an Onryo she's responsible for the malicious deaths of dozens of people. Even in the afterlife, sins of that gravity hold a great deal of weight, and because she's dead, she doesn't have the time to work towards redemption. She's destined for hell."

"I don't care."

"How is it that you are even able to deny her from hell?" Constantine took a closer look at Tim, looking at something Damian clearly couldn't see, eyes widening in disbelief after a moment had passed. "You..." he said softly before his voice rose in agitation. "You took a portion of her sins into yourself?! What the hell?! Are you out of your mind?!"

Tim winced at the scolding, but his expression remained resolute. "It was the only way to keep her from being dragged into hell," he said. "I would've taken all of it if I could."

"By putting your own mortal soul at risk?! God damned bleeding-heart martyrs... Do you understand what you've done?" Constantine was livid. "Your mortal body is on the verge of death. If you die now, your soul is technically in balance. You can't go to heaven, and technically you shouldn't go to hell either. However, hell already has its hooks into you, so they will do their damnedest to drag you down into its rotting depths. Do you want that?! All for the sake of one rotten little demon spawn?!"

"She's not a demon spawn!" Tim growled back. "She's just a child who got dealt a shit hand of cards in life, suffered horribly in death, and lashed out when she got stuck as a ghost because she just didn't know any better! How could she when all life taught her was violence, pain, and misery?!"

Constantine's stern expression faltered. "You can't save her like this," he tried to reason. "She's beyond saving."

Tim sighed as she tucked the girl's head beneath his chin. "If she's beyond saving, then so am I, because I won't give up on her."

"Why is this so important to you?" Constantine asked, a little more gently. "Why is this something you want to risk your immortal soul for?"

There was long pause as Tim rested there, the girl wrapped up protectively in his arms.

"Timothy?"

Tim sighed. "Damian."

"The current Robin?"

Tim nodded. "If a child like Minako can be doomed to hell because of life beyond her control, then what hope can there be for a child like Damian, who has done horrible things of his own free will because of the way he was raised before he came to Bruce?"

Minako turned her head up to Tim as the older teenager drew her closer. "[Big brother...]"

"He's not a bad kid," Tim stammered out, his head bowed. "We don't get along at all, but that's just us, and with Dick and Bruce he's really trying to be better. I know that." He glanced up at Constantine. "I have to hope-- I have to believe that he will become a good person, if he's given the time to learn what that means."

Constantine glanced back at where Damian stood, dumbfounded. "And if it was Damian being dragged into hell right now instead of Minako, would you protect him as fiercely as you are her right now?"

There was no hesitation when Tim responded. "With my last dying breath."

Constantine sighed. "Will this girl listen to you?"

Tim looked at him in mild confusion. "I think so. Why?"

"Because an aspect of herself is causing trouble for your family in the physical realm. It's bad enough they're worried sick about you, but her appearance has complicated matters there, especially with your youngest brother."

His eyes widened. "Has she hurt Damian?!"

Constantine glanced back again at the otherwise unseen Damian. "Not physically, but she's been giving him a psychological brow-beating from how I understand it."

Tim's eyes narrowed seriously, and he looked down at the girl in his arms. A brief conversation was held between them in Japanese. Minako looked guilty, like a child with her hand caught in a cookie jar, then apologetic. She murmured something which seemed to satisfy Tim as he stroked her hair in a comforting gesture.

"She will back off," Tim assured Constantine. "She shouldn't trouble anyone in the manor anymore."

"And you're sure she'll honor her word?"

"She really is a good girl," Tim said as he turned his gaze to Constantine. "She's just scared and confused and doesn't know any bet--" Tim's words were cut off abruptly when all of a sudden the chains from the well jerked tight. Minako cried out in terror as she clung to Tim, who immediately tightened his own grip around the little girl and did his best to brace himself against the savage pull of the chains. Thick metal links scraped loudly against the stones, and though Tim dug in his heels and put all his weight into the otherwordly tug-of-war he was engaged in, Damian and Constantine could see that he was still losing ground.

Damian fisted his hands tightly as he struggled not to rush over to help his older brother. Constantine even looked tempted to add his own grip to the chain, but stayed his own ground.

The tug-of-war lasted several long minutes, but finally the chains went slack and Tim stumbled backwards to the ground, gasping for ragged breaths as he held the weeping girl close to his chest. His whole body seemed to curl around the small child, partially as a protective gesture, partially because of the obvious pain he was suffering himself.

Constantine slowly moved to Tim's side and knelt down beside him. "You don't have to suffer all this, you know," he said with a pragmatic tone. "The girl belongs to hell."

"I refuse to accept that."

"She's not your responsibility."

"She is now."

"Your body is dying in the physical realm, Timothy."

"I know."

"All you have to do to save your life and return to your family is let her go."

"No."

"You've done all you can, Timothy," Constantine tried to reason once more. "You've done more than any normal mortal soul can be expected to in such an unusual situation. That you've forced hell into a stalemate over her by sheer force of will is remarkable. However, you've reached your limits. It's time for you to accept that you cannot help her and you have to go home."

Tim was silent as he gingerly eased himself back into a sitting position. He looked exhausted and the very act of moving seemed to end jolts of pain through his limbs. The chains rattled as they shifted along with him. Minako murmured something which caused Tim to shake his head with a small reassuring smile before he eased her to his chest and tucked her head beneath his own chin.

"I understand what you are trying to do, Constantine," Tim said calmly, his voice barely rising above a whisper. It was clear that the chains wound around his neck had taken a toll on his throat. The teenager uncomfortably tried to clear it before continuing. "But I cannot abandon her to... to that." He gave the well a sidelong glance, then sighed. "If I can't save a single child's soul from being dragged into hell, then..." Tim paused to rest his cheek on the top of Minako's head wearily. "Then returning home would be a pointless act, because I wouldn't be able to live with myself after such a complete failure." He looked up at Constantine apologetically. "I'm sorry for causing you and my family so much trouble, but it appears you've all wasted your time."

Constantine sighed as pulled out a cigarette. "Not in the least, Timothy," the older man reassured him after lighting up. "This has not been a waste of time." As Tim looked at him curiously, Constantine took a long drag before continuing in a grave tone. "Realistically, how much longer do you think you can hold out here?"

"I... I don't know," Tim murmured. "I'm not even sure how long I've been here. It feels like it's been forever." He swallowed hard.

The older man studied the chains. "How many more fights with the chains can you honestly hold your own against?"

Tim contemplated the chains with a grave expression. "One... Maybe two..."

If Tim's expression was to be believed, there were serious doubts about surviving just one more battle against hell, let alone two.

Constantine nodded, then tapped out one more cigarette and offered it to Tim. The teenager regarded it for a moment before smiling weakly and taking it between two fingers. "Thanks," he said after Constantine helped him light it up. Tim took a short, experimental drag. "Not bad."

"My own special blend."

Tim looked at Constantine with undisguised gratitude. "Thank you," he murmured.

Constantine nodded as he pocketed the pack. "I'll do what I can to get both of you out of this situation," he promised Tim. "But if it doesn't work, I must say it's been a honor to meet you."

"And if it does work?" Tim asked.

Constantine smirked. "Oh you'll owe me... Big time."

That drew a chuckle from Tim, the smoke escaping his mouth as he laughed softly. "Isn't that always the way with you mystic types."

"Better in debt than dead."

Tim smirked. "We'll see about that when the debt collector comes to town."

Constantine's gaze softened. "I like you kid. For what it's worth, I do hope we actually get to work together in the future."

Tim nodded. "For what it's worth," he echoed, "Thank you for giving me something to look forward to."

"Hope is a potent weapon, especially when fighting hell's machinations. Hold onto it as long as you can."

*****

When Damian opened his eyes, he found himself sitting alone on the bed in the guest room. A look downward quickly confirmed that he was back in his physical ten-year old body. Constantine was already gone, but he could hear voices coming from the hallway.

"My advice... If your son makes it out of this situation alive, you really ought to have a long talk with him about his self preservation issues."

Damian opened the door just in time to see his father glaring silent daggers at Constantine.

"I'm hoping that comment actually has some deeper meaning," Alfred remarked evenly, though he was clearly not pleased either, "and wasn't just an inconsiderate barb thrown at a most inopportune moment."

"There's good news, bad news, and worse news," Constantine started. Rather than wait for any choices to be thrown at him, he immediately went into explaining.

"The good news is Timothy is alive, spiritually speaking. The body in that bedroom isn't just an empty husk. His soul is still earthbound, although only reachable via the astral plane. The original contract he made with the Onryo, that he would go to heaven with her, has been rendered null and void."

Bruce's expression became grave. "What exactly nullified the contract?"

Constantine sighed. "That leads into the worst news," he started. "The reason the contract was voided is because the Onryo's soul isn't going to heaven. Now that she wants to move on, the only direction for her to go is towards hell."

Dick's face went pale. "She's dragging Tim down to hell with her?!"

"Actually, quite the opposite. Your younger brother is holding her back."

"What?" Bruce's expression spoke clearly of confusion.

"Timothy is clearly a very good person. His soul was naturally skewed heavily towards 'good'."

"You said 'was'."

Constantine nodded. "In an attempt to save the Onryo's soul, he took the weight of her sins onto himself. However, the weight of her sins was too great to escape hell's grasp. The most he could manage was a stalemate, but it won't remain like that for much longer. Timothy has a very strong will, but he's been away from his physical body for far too long. Without sufficient training, a mortal soul cannot be separate from his or her body and under such an assault for an extended period of time. He is very weak right now, and if there is no intervention, he will die and his soul will belong to hell before the sun rises."

"Is there anything we can do to save him?"

"And that leads into the bad news," Constantine said. "There is no safe way to get Timothy out of this situation."

Dick looked ill. "There's no hope of saving him?"

"I didn't say that." Constantine corrected. "I just said there's no safe way. There might be a way to save your brother's life, but it's a plan based on theoreticals and the cost of failure might be too high for your family to accept."

Bruce regarded Constantine coolly. "How high?"

"If nothing is done for Timothy, you will lose a son," Constantine said solemnly. "However, if this plan is put into motion and fails, you will lose not just one son, but two."

Constantine looked over his shoulder at Damian, who had been watching the conversation from the partially open bedroom door. "In this plan, Damian is the only one who can save Timothy.  Unfortunately, the only way he will be able to accomplish this is by putting his own mortal soul on the line."


	9. Muonna

The bedroom is icy cold when Damian stepped cautiously through the doorway. His warm breath rose up into the air as he exhaled in a pale cloud. Childishly, he inwardly chastised, the thought of dragon breath was the first thing it reminded him of.

Such a childish thought.

Damian wished he wasn't a child. He didn't feel like a child. He was a Robin.

However, being a child was the reason he was the only one able to save his older brother's life.

*****

_"So your plan to get rid of the ghost girl haunting Tim is to invite another stronger, more dangerous ghost into this house?" Dick didn't even bother to mask the incredulous angry tone in his voice._

_"There is a method to my madness," Constantine said as he handed Damian four small pillar candles and a Japanese styled bamboo flute that he'd had Zatanna teleport to him. "Here. You'll need this and these."_

_"This I'd like to hear," Dick grumbled.  
_

_"The situation with your brother is extremely grave, but not completely without hope," Constantine reiterated. "The simplest solution would be for him to release his hold on the Onryo's spirit and allow her to be taken into hell, leaving his soul free to return to his body. Unfortunately, Timothy has an overdeveloped sense of righteous indignation and a non-existent sense of self-preservation. He refuses to abandon the child to her fate."_

_Bruce shared an uncomfortable glance with Dick. The exchange was not missed by Constantine, but he chose not to call either of them on it._

_"Is there any way to force him to release her? To pry the two apart?" Bruce asked.  
_

_"Safely? Perhaps... But that would require a month of Sundays and at least two Japanese exorcists, neither of which we can obtain before sunrise."_

_Dick sighed. "But why is Damian the only one who can summon this... Moo-oh-naw? Why does he have to be in that room alone with both those ghosts?"_

_"Because the Muonna is--" Constantine paused, pinched the bridge of his nose, and sighed. "You have to understand what a Muonna is."_

_"What is a Muonna?" Damian asked._

_Constantine regarded Damian. "A Muonna is a cursed spirit, like an Onryo. However, this spirit is created specifically when a mother dies in the process of failing her child during a scenario of violence of sickness._

_"You see, when she dies under these circumstances, her soul gets stuck with an obsessive desire to save her lost child. Naturally, she is drawn to children suffering from dire predicaments. However, because she is a cursed spirit, all she will ultimately bring to those living children she tries to help is death and further suffering."_

_Bruce sighed. "So your plan is to lure the Muonna here in hopes that the Onryo will choose to leave Tim in favor of attaching herself to a mother-figure." The skepticism in his voice was obvious. "And the only way to lure her here is with another child..."_

_"I think I hate this plan," Dick muttered with a frown. "What's to stop the Muonna from going after Damian the moment she shows up? How do we even know that bringing the Muonna here will make the Onryo let go of Tim?"_

_Constantine reached into his pocket and pulled out a book of matches, opening it to make sure it still had some sticks inside. "Honestly speaking, I don't know that for certain. Whether or not the Muonna will lure the Onryo away from Tim is purely theoretical at this point. However, we're very short on options right now. However, if Damian follows my instructions, then he should be in no danger from the Muonna."_

_"What do I need to do?" Damian asked as he took the book of matches from Constantine._

_"Are you sure you want to do this?" Bruce asked Damian. "You don't have to. We can find another way--"_

_Damian shook his head. "There is no other way, Father. You know that. And as I said before, I want to do this."_

*****

Once the door was closed behind him, Damian looked towards the bed. All was quiet and calm in the room, though he could feel eyes watching him. The sensation raised an army of goosebumps on his skin. However, he had a job to do and he wasn't about to let the corpse girl make him fail before he even began.

He owed Drake that much.

_"When you enter the room, the first thing you need to do is light a candle in each of the four corners. The candles will give off a smoke that will otherwise mask most of your presence from all spiritual entities in the room."_

Constantine's very specific instructions echoed in his ears as he moved about the room, lighting the candles he'd been given.

*****

_"Then, find a seat somewhere within the boundaries created by the candles and start playing the flute, preferably well away from Timothy's bed."_

_Damian looked at the bamboo flute in his hand._

_"Um... I have no idea how to play this."_

_"It's called a shakuhachi, and it plays more like a recorder than silver flute, so you should be alright. Kids play recorders all the time. Just blow into this end and use your fingers on those holes there to play the notes."_

_The boy looked at Constantine skeptically._

_"It doesn't matter what you play, or how well," Constantine told him. "The flute has two purposes. First, it's cursed. The original owner was the child of a woman who became a Muonna. Whenever any child plays it, it lures her in like a duck call, no matter where you are in the world."_

_"And you just happen to coincidentally have a flute that summons a Muonna in your possession?"_

_Constantine shrugged. "It was given to me years ago by a witch I visited several years back in Japan. It was payment for helping grant a wish of a customer of hers. She said I'd need it one day." He smirked at the memory of the woman. "And she was of the opinion that nothing is coincidence."_

_Damian rolled his eyes. "And what's the second purpose for the flute?"_

_"To give you a safe way to breathe."_

_"What do you mean?"_

_"Many malicious spirits, especially Japanese ones, are drawn to the living by their breaths. The breath of life seems to have a rather attractive aroma to spirits, or so I've been told." Constantine indicated the candles. "The candles will give off a scent that ought to mask most of your presence. However, they can't cover the scent of the breath that comes out directly from your lungs. It's too strong. Inhaling is no problem, but when you exhale, you have to do so through the flute."_

_"So the purpose of the candle and the flute, in part, is to hide me from the Muonna as well as summon her?"_

_"Exactly."_

_*****_

It wasn't hard to find a seat a couple of feet away from the foot of Tim's bed. Once he was comfortable, he brought the flute up to his lips and began to play. Damian winced at several painfully sour notes that came out of the instrument. However, after a few minutes, he managed to figure out how to play a basic set of scales. Just as Constantine had instructed him, Damian breathed in through his nose and out through the flute. A few more minutes passed, and he soon got bored with scales, so he started experimenting, flowing random notes into one another. Whatever sounded good to his ears and felt comfortable to his fingers.

It was a rather soothing exercise. Damian could see himself slipping into a meditative state quite easily while playing an instrument like this.

Then a sudden cold gust of wind blew through the otherwise closed off room, extinguishing the candles, and the soothing atmosphere was quite gone.

***

_"I'm not sure what will be the definite signs that the Muonna has arrived, but when she does, you will know it." Constantine looked down at Damian. "When she does, there are two rules you must follow, no matter what." There was such a grave tone to his voice that Damian felt a small chill run down his spine._

_"What are they?"_

_"The first rule and most important rule is to not breathe out through anything other than that flute," Constantine instructed. "If, for whatever reason, you do not have that flute in your mouth, you do not exhale under any circumstances. If you do, the Muonna is certain to focus on you and not the Onryo, and if that happens, no one can do anything to help you. Understood?"_

_Damian nodded. "And the second?"_

_"The second is that once she is in the room you close your eyes. Whatever happens, do not look upon her."_

_"Why not?"_

_Constantine sighed. "Because there are some things in life that, once seen, can never be unseen."_

*****

Despite not getting any clarification about the second rule from Constantine, as soon as the atmosphere had shifted in Tim's bedroom, Damian shut his eyes tight. Although his playing slowed significantly, it did not stop. There would be pauses during which he tried to listen for any sounds of the Muonna, and then he would play a few notes here and there as he exhaled for another breath of air.

During the pauses where no music filled the air, Damian strained his ears for any sign of the Muonna's presence. Though the air was far colder than it was before, and the constant beeping from the life support machines was still there, the boy could hear nothing else out of the ordinary. His brow furrowed as frustration and curiosity began to build.

It was too quiet.

Was she really there?

If she was, what was she doing?

Was the Onryo really taking the bait?

How would he know that the ghosts were gone?

He played a few more notes, but his curiosity was eating away at him.

_"Just one look."_

The thought crossed his mind before he had a chance to squash it. It took root in his curiosity and grew.

_"Just one look. A quick glance won't hurt. Just need to make sure she's really here. Need to make sure the plan is working. I gotta do it for Drake... To make sure he'll be ok._

_Just one look."_

His mind finally made up, Damian swallowed hard before slowly, warily, opening his eyes.

***

From outside the closed door of Tim's bedroom, the adults all stood nervously waiting for any sign that the plan was working. Through the solid wooden door, they could hear the sound of Damian's novice, hesitant flute playing.

Their attention was immediately piqued when the noticed the sudden shift in the speed of his playing. The temptation to open the door and see what was happening was great, but they restrained themselves.

The playing may have slowed, but it hadn't stopped.

No one was out of the woods yet.

Then, all of a sudden, there was a shrill, piercing squawk from the flute that raked across everyone's hearing like nails on a chalkboard. It loud and short and immediately followed by the sound of the bamboo flute clattering to the hardwood floor.

That was then followed by silence.

"Damian!" Bruce rushed for the door, but was immediately barred by Constantine.

"Stop!"

Bruce looked ready to punch Constantine growled. "Let me through!"

Constantine narrowed his eyes. "It's not over yet." The paranormalist glared daggers at the door. Though he couldn't see what was going on behind the closed door, he could sense it. "Something's gone wrong."

*****

Damian sat in the dark with his back pressed as tightly against the wall as he could. The flute was lying on the floor, utterly forgotten. His eyes were wide with terror as he tightly clasped both his hands over his mouth and nose in an effort to prevent any air... any exclamation of his fright... from escaping.

Inches away from his face...

...The Muonna was staring straight at him.

Silent as the grave, the Muonna had been crouching there right in front of Damian when the boy dared to open his eyes. Who knew how long the Japanese cursed spirit had been sitting there, watching him.  
  
As Damian stared at the Muonna, he wished he had never opened his eyes. The sight of the spirit was more unnerving than anything he'd ever seen as Robin. The Muonna was dressed in a traditional Japanese kimono, colored white with red trim. Her long black hair was done up in a very traditional hairstyle, held in place with an ivory comb carved in the shape of a three flower blossoms. But those details were barely registered by Damian in the back of his terrified mind.

His eyes were firmly fixed on the fact that she had no face.

Where the Muonna's face ought to have been, there was flat, featureless skin. That in and of itself was disturbing, but what added to the boy's fear was the fact that the skin was partially translucent. Through the skin, he could see the vague features of bones and cords of muscles. He could see, through the skin, the orbs of eyeballs staring straight at him, while the Muonna's jaws, full of teeth and backed by a tongue, moved as if speaking. However, because it had no mouth, no words came out.

The Muonna looked a little confused, as if it could sense Damian's presence, but couldn't quite pinpoint exactly where he was. Every cell in Damian's body was screaming at him to move, to run away, but he was too scared to move.

Then, as he watched helplessly in horror, the face of the Muonna began to shift. Features began to develop, and right before his eyes his own mother's face began to appear on that flat translucent skin.

As Damian tried to shrink back into the unforgiving wall, his hands trembling both from lack of air and fright, the Muonna wearing his mother's face opened her mouth and began to speak.

"Damian," she whispered in his mother's stolen voice. The Muonna slowly turned her head this way... then that... "Damian, where are you?"

Damian's eyes widened and he bit down on his lips to keep from whimpering.

"Mother is here, Damian," the Muonna whispered temptingly in the sweetest tones Damian had ever heard from his mother's voice. "But Mother cannot see you. Where are you Damian? Mother misses you. Mother wants to see you so much. Mother wants to take Damian home."

Damian wished he could close his eyes shut. He wished he could cut off his ears and stab out his eyes, so he wouldn't be tormented by this mockery of his mother who was so tempting regardless of how utterly wrong the depiction was. Tears began to whell up as his lungs began to strain for air.

"[Momma?]"

A tiny girl's Japanese voice, hesitant and frightened, interrupted the Muonna's tempting words. It caused the Muonna to freeze in its searching, and almost immediately the image of Damian's mother erased itself from her face, much to his relief.

"[Momma? Is that you?]"

The Muonna straightened up, and as she did so Damian watched as her blank face shifted once more. This time, though, her features became distinctly Japanese. There was a look of careworn hardship on her face, as if she'd suffered a very hard life, but managed to put on a caring, motherly expression as she turned to Timothy's bed.

"[Minako?]" the Muonna purred affectionately. "[Where are you, Minako?]"

As the body of the Muonna shifted, Damian saw the girl in white, as herself and not the corpse, leap from the foot of his brother's bed into the Muonna's open arms. "[Momma!]" she cried out joyfully. "[I'm here, Momma! I'm here!]"

The Muonna's menacing, predatory aura seemed to fade almost immediately as she wrapped her arms around the child. The cursed spirit's obsessively maternal instincts had kicked in, and she treated the little girl as if she were her own lost child. "[Mother is here. Mother missed you so much.]"

"[I was lost and scared and alone,]" Minako whimpered. "[But then Big Brother found me and took care of me while you were gone.]" She clung to the Muonna.

The Muonna stroked the girl's hair. "[Mother is here now. Mother will take care of you. Now it's time to go home.]"

The girl glanced back quickly at Tim, still lying unconscious on the bed. She rushed over to his side, and with tears in her eyes she placed a ghostly kiss on his cheek.

"[Thank you, Big Brother, for everything,]" she said sweetly before going back to the Muonna and taking the motherly spirit's hand. Then, as Damian watched, the two of them walked toward closed bedroom door and faded away.

*****

As soon as the two spirits faded into nonexistance, as soon as the air warmed to a reasonable temperature, despite Damian's uncontrollable shivering, the boy finally let go of his breath. He seemed almost to crumple in on himself as he gasped for air. For a long several minutes, the only sound in the otherwise quiet room were Damian's ragged gasps and the steady beeps from the life support machines.

As Damian's breathing became more steady and quiet, he noted the otherwise lack of sound with growing trepidation. The ghosts were gone. That much was certain.

But...

What about Drake?

_"Even if we succeed in removing the Onryo from the equation, there is a chance that we could still lose Timothy. In the astral plane, he was very weak. He may not be strong enough to return to his body."_

Damian closed his eyes tightly and bowed his head as Constantine's final words before he entered the room echoed in his mind.

Was he too late?

Did he fail?

"Damian?"

The boy's eyes snapped open at the faint sound of his own name. He slowly lifted his head up. To his great relief, another pair of blue eyes met his own gaze. Tim looked sick and exhausted, his skin pale save for the dark shadows under his eyes.

But he was alive.

"Damian," Tim murmured weakly, his voice barely louder than a whisper. "Are you alright?"

Damian stared at Tim wide eyed. After everything that had happened. After all the sacrifices made and how close he came to death, it took a moment for the boy to fully absorb his older brother's question.

After everything he had been through...

Tim's first concern...

Was for him.

Tears slipped down Damian's face. "You... You idiot."


	10. The Price of Success

The suitcase closed with a snap, drawing a small sigh out of Tim as he rested both his hands on top of the large case resting on his bed. Packing was never an activity he enjoyed, and figuring out what he would need for the trip he would be taking had been a hassle almost as exhausting as tying up loose ends with Batman Inc, the Titans, and Wayne Enterprises.

He shook his head with a wry smile and chuckle.

"What's so amusing, Timothy?" Alfred asked as he went to take the suitcase and set it next to the other that he had been working on himself.

"Just imagining the fit Leslie would have if she knew how busy I'd let myself get this week." Tim sat down on the edge of his bed, intending only to sit for a moment to catch his breath. As he got off his feet, though, an annoyingly familiar weariness reared its ugly head. Grudgingly, Tim decided to lay back fully on his bed, closing his eyes as he did so.

Alfred looked over Tim with grandfatherly concern. "Have you eaten at all today?"

Tim shook his head without opening his eyes.

"Is the medication still making you nauseous?"

"Yeah."

It wasn't hard for Tim to imagine the concerned look Alfred was wearing at that precise moment. He could hear it in the old man's voice all too well, and had seen far too much of it over the last three weeks.

"You should have something to eat before you leave. Some broth at least, and perhaps some bread. You shouldn't travel on an empty stomach."

Tim frowned and shook his head. The thought of food made his stomach turn. Then he turned his head and glanced at his nightstand. With a small frown he tried to overlook the orange pill bottle and moved his gaze to the book-sized package wrapped in plain brown paper.

"Where's Damian?" Tim asked.

Alfred was on his way out, but paused in the doorway at the question. "I believe he's in his own room right now." He raised an eyebrow. "Are you planning to speak with him before you leave?

"Yeah," Tim said as he slowly pulled himself back into a sitting position.

"I'll look for you in his room when it's time to leave," Alfred said before stepping out into the hallway.

*****

When Tim knocked on Damian's door and got no response, he wondered if perhaps the boy was asleep. It was a theory that was confirmed when he cracked open the door to peek in.

Though it was approaching three in the afternoon, Damian was fast asleep on his bed. It looked as if he'd passed out while reading and listening to music, his eyeglasses still perched on the bridge of his nose. He looked so peaceful that Tim was second guessing his visit with the boy. He nearly left without waking his younger brother.

Then Titus, who was laying down near Damian's legs, noticed that there was a visitor. The black Great Dane lifted his head with a massive yawn. Then he looked at Tim, and his long tail started wagging, smacking Damian repetitively against the shins. Tim snickered when Damian jerked awake abruptly. His smile faded into a more neutral expression when Damian became aware of his surroundings and the fact that he had a visitor.

"Oh... It's you," Damian murmured as he sat up, taking a moment to adjust his glasses.

"You really shouldn't sleep in those," Tim said as he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. "Those frames are pretty thin. You're liable to bend or break them if you're not careful."

"How would you know?" Damian asked grumpily.

Tim smiled sheepishly. "Because, I used to wear glasses when I was younger, before I switched to contacts. I ruined three pairs because I tossed and turned in my sleep."

Damian just looked at Tim with what could only be described as an inwardly confused expression, full of uncertainty about what to say to that.

The silence was awkward. It always was now whenever they tried to talk to one another. Damian was never ready or willing to make the first move. That was always up to Tim. It had been uncomfortable at first, but it was getting easier.

Tim was especially motivated now, as he glanced down at the package in his hands. This might be the last face-to-face conversation he'd have with Damian for a long while.

"So, how have you been?" Tim asked as he went to take a seat on Damian's bed, sitting on the other side of Titus, keeping the dog between him and his brother.

"Ok, I guess," Damian replied, keeping his eyes on Titus as he scratched the dog behind the ears. Though he was enjoying the ear scritches, Titus gave Tim a look, as if encouraging the teenager to keep going with the conversation.

It was hard to continue, though.

So much had happened over the last few weeks. So much had changed.

Some for the better.

Some for the worse.

*****

_The door to Tim's bedroom slowly opened and, to everyone's great relief, Damian edged his way out. He looked shaken and exhausted, and his eyes were rimmed red as if he'd been crying, but he was alive._

_"Damian!" Bruce exclaimed as he rushed to his son's side and placed a steadying hand on the boy's shoulder. "Are you alright? Are you hurt?"_

_Damian shook his head. "I'm ok. It's over."_

_"Tim?"_

_Damian turned his eyes toward the still open door. "He's awake."_

_The news that Tim was awake and alive seemed to lift a heavy weight from his father's massive frame. Bruce nodded to Alfred and followed after Leslie, who was already heading into the room._

_His father wasn't gone for more than a second when another pair of strong hands settled on Damian's shoulders. The boy looked up to see Dick staring down at him with love and concern. The older man didn't say a word, merely pulled him into a tight hug. Normally Damian would protest the affectionate gesture, but not tonight. Instead, the boy closed his eyes and let himself be enveloped by his big brother's strong embrace._

_After a bit, Dick gently pulled himself away from Damian. "Are you sure you're not hurt?" he asked. "The Muonna didn't do anything to you, did she?"_

_Damian shook his head. "No. I'm not injured." He drew in a deep breath to steady himself. "The plan worked as Constantine hoped it would. The Muonna came and the Onryo chose to leave Drake and go with her instead. Everything's fine now."_

_Dick smiled down at Damian, his eyes full of relief and pride. But then, very slowly, the smile began to fade. His expression grew puzzled and concern began to seep in, sending a stab of worry through Damian as well._

_"Richard? What's wrong?"_

_Dick gently moved Damian into better lighting, then cradled Damian's face with his hands. "Your eyes," he murmured as he tilted his brother's head this way and that, disbelief in his tone. "What happened to your eyes?"_

_"My eyes?" Damian pulled away from his brother's hold and went back into the guest bedroom adjacent Tim's. He turned on the light and went straight to the mirror. As soon as he saw what his brother had seen, he backed away slowly from his own reflection._

_His eyes._

_The blue Wayne eyes he got from his father._

_Now they were grey._

_Damian trembled as he backed away from his reflection. He didn't stop until his back met the bed._

_"What happened Damian?" Dick asked as he followed his brother into the room._

_"I-- I don't know."_

_"He didn't follow all my rules."_

_Dick turned to look at Constantine while Damian closed his eyes and flinched guiltily away from the entering paranormalist._

_Constantine ignored Dick and went straight for Damian. Despite the boy's sudden aversion to direct eye contact, John roughly grabbed him by the chin and forcibly turned his face. "Open your eyes, Damian."_

_"I'm sorry," Damian stammered, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. "I only meant to take a quick glance. I wasn't sure if she was there. I mean to-- I didn't know that--"_

_Constantine shook his head, his tone a little more gentle, but still extremely firm. "None of that matters now. What's done is done. Now let me see your eyes. I need to see what the damage is."_

_Slowly, reluctantly, Damian opened his eyes and looked up at Constantine. The older man looked at his eyes closely. Once he was done, he released his hold on Damian's chin, allowing the boy to return to Dick's side._

_"What happened, Constantine?" Dick asked. "What's wrong with his eyes? Is Damian's life in danger?"_

_Constantine went to the nearby window and pushed aside the curtains to look outside. Then he sighed. "I warned you, before you went in, that there are things in this world that, once seen, cannot be unseen. No, Mr. Grayson. Damian's life is not in danger, but his perception of the world is forever changed."_

_"Changed how?"_

_"Damian come here," he motioned for the boy. Reluctantly, after a glance up at Dick for reassurance, Damian walked forward. "Look out the window. I know it's dark, but tell me what you see when you look outside."_

_Warily, Damian pushed aside part of the curtain and peered out into the darkness. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, and for that moment he stood in silence._

_Then, all of a sudden, Damian gasped in alarm and jerked himself backward away from the window. "What was that?!" Damian demanded as he stumbled back into Dick. The boy was tense and frightened._

_"Damian," Constantine said evenly. "What did you see?"_

_The boy swallowed hard. "It looked like a dog. At first I thought it was Titus, that someone put him outside again. But then I realized it was too big." He swallowed again. "It was too big, and it's eyes were glowing yellow. It looked like a shaggy wolf, but it was greenish black and translucent like a shadow."_

_"That was a Cu Sith," Constantine explained. "A fae hound that is usually a harbinger of death."_

_A shiver ran down Damian's spine. "Usually?"_

_Constantine shrugged. "You didn't hear any dogs baying, did you? He probably sensed someone was near death here, but since no one died, he'll be heading out before too long."_

_Curious, Dick moved to the window himself and looked outside. Damian went with him. "He's right over there," the boy said as he pointed towards the front gates leading to the manor driveway._

_Dick shook his head. "I don't see anything," he admitted._

_"That's because your sight is normal," Constantine explained. "Most of the time, children are more sensitive to spiritual creature because of their youth and their imagination. They can catch glimpses of ghosts, fairies, and other things that adults are unable to see. However, as they get older, that part of their vision closes off. All they're able to see is the physical reality in front of them."_

_"So what happened to Damian?"_

_"That which has been seen cannot be unseen," Constantine repeated. "Damian looked at the Muonna, an elusive but powerful curse spirit, full in the face. That kind of vision leaves a permanent scar on a mortal's psyche."_

_"Which means..?"_

_"Which means that Damian will always see the unseen," Constantine said grimly. "Spirits, ghosts, angels, demons, fae, and nightmares. They exist everywhere and he will see them for the rest of his life." Then the paranormalist's expression grew grave. "And once those spirits realize he can see them, they will be drawn to him like moths to a flame."_

*****

The eyeglasses had been a parting gift from Constantine. He'd gotten them from the same woman who'd given him the Japanese flute. On the surface, they seemed like a very simple pair of wireframe eyeglasses with seemingly ordinary glass lenses. In reality, the glasses were enchanted. The lenses acted as both a filter and glamour charm for Damian.

Their first purpose was to filter out the sight of the supernatural from Damian's vision. While he wore the glasses, everything looked "normal". It didn't stop him from catching sight of "things" out of the corner of his vision where the lenses didn't reach, but he was quickly learning to keep his eyes forward while wearing the glasses.

The second purpose was to disguise the sudden change of color in his eyes. While he wore the glasses, the blue Wayne hue of his eyes was present, disguising the fact that they were actually grey behind the lenses.

Tim looked at Damian, taking in his new profile with the glasses. Then he looked down at the package in his hands. "I have something for you."

Damian finally turned to look at Tim directly. "Something?"

The teenage boy offered his younger brother the package.

As Titus sniffed it curiously, Damian took it from Tim's hand. He looked from the package to his brother in confusion.

"It's a gift," Tim assured him.

"Can I open it now?"

Tim nodded. "But when you do, I'd like you to do something for me."

Damian raised an eyebrow at him.

"Nothing bad. Just a small request. Open it."

The boy took a moment to slide his glasses back up the bridge of his nose before carefully tearing the brown paper away. Damian's eyes lit up as he discovered the gorgeous leather-bound sketchbook now in his possession. Though the cover of the book seemed old, it had been obviously well cared for, as if it were from an antique book. The pages within, while blank, were made of some natural fiber that added a sprinkling of tiny brown and red specks and a nice texture to the cream colored paper. The edges of the pages were also trimmed with gold leaf.

Damian admired his new sketchbook with a happier expression than Tim had ever seen.

"Do you like it?"

Damian nodded. "I've never seen a sketchbook like this before," he admitted as he leafed through some of the blank pages, running his fingertips over them as he felt their texture. "Where did you get this?"

Tim shrugged. "I called in a favor," he said dismissively. "Now, there is one thing I'd like you to do for me, if you can."

"Yes?"

"Could you draw one of the supernatural creatures you've seen on one of those pages?"

Damian froze in his examination of the book and looked at Tim incredulously. "What?"

Tim lifted his hands up in a calming gesture. "Please. I have my reasons. Can you just humor me, just this once?"

The boy glared in mild irritation at Tim before looking down at the sketchbook again. Just seeing all those lovely pristine pages made his fingers itch for his pencils, but the thought of drawing one of the supernatural creatures he's been seeing around the city made his skin crawl. He finally closed his eyes and sighed.

"Alright. But just one," he agreed. Tim nodded with a smile.

Damian crawled over the bed and reached into a drawer in his nightstand for a wooden pencil case. Tim watched, with great curiosity, as the boy began to sketch. Part of the curiosity was for being able to see the kinds of things Damian now saw when he went without his glasses. The other part of the curiosity was just watching Damian draw for the first time. Since Damian wasn't too crazy about the subject he was filling the page with, which was a sketch of the Cu Sith he'd seen the first night his eyes were changed, he sketched as quickly as he could, not caring too much about how accurate he was with the details.

"There," Damian said with a note of finality as he set the pencil down. "Are you happy now?"

Tim kept his eyes on the page, then smiled. "Quite."

Damian turned his gaze downward as he moved to close the sketchbook, making a mental note to cut out the page later, when he froze. In the empty spaces surrounding the sketch of the Cu Sith, neat black calligraphic script was starting to appear.

"What's happening?"

"Just watch."

Damian watched as words filled the page. The name of the creature, "Cu Sith", was written at the top of the page in bold elegant letters. The rest of the text, in far smaller but still legible script, read like the entry of a supernatural field journal. Details concerning the Cu Sith's creation, behavior, diet, as well as other informative facts appeared. Soon as words stopped appearing on the page and after Damian took a moment to glance over everything, he jerked his head back to Tim who was wearing a very contented smile.

"What kind of sketchbook is this?" the bewildered boy asked. "Where did you get this?"

"I already told you, I called in a favor."

It took a moment for Damian to catch the meaning behind Tim's words, but when he realized what was being said, his eyes went wide behind his glasses.

"Jason Blood!" he exclaimed. "This sketchbook is from Jason Blood?"

Tim nodded. "I told him about what happened to your vision the night you saved my life," he started. "I told him about how you haven't been going on patrol as Robin because of the things you kept seeing in the city. Turns out, he's known for quite some time that Gotham is a hotbed for creatures like these. I asked him for something to help you, and he gave me this." He tapped the sketchbook. "The book is magically linked to Jason's library, specifically his books on supernatural creatures. When you draw a creature on a page, the rest of the space will fill up with all the information he has on it. It's like a paranormal field guide for you. That way, you'll know what you're seeing, if they're a threat or not, and if they are how to deal with them." Tim smiled reassuringly. "And if you ever run out of pages, all you have to do is give him a call and he'll send you another blank sketchbook."

It took a moment for Damian to find his voice. "Why?" he asked. "You told me you've been holding onto that favor from Jason Blood for years! Why would waste it on me?!"

Tim's smile faded.

Damian shook his head, frustration written all over his face. "Jason Blood is one of the most powerful mystics in the world, right? You should have used your favor to get him to help you! To heal you!" Damian closed the sketchbook with a snap between his hands. "He could have fixed you," he lamented. "Then you wouldn't have to take all those pills that keep making you sick! You wouldn't have to leave the country to recover in seclusion! You wouldn't have to give up being Red Robin!" Damian squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head. "You shouldn't keep giving up things for me."

The teenager sighed. Damian hadn't been the only one to suffer a heavy price for dealing with the Japanese curse spirits. It was true that Damian had saved his life, but Tim's stubborn refusal to let the Onryo descend into hell had still taken a toll on him. The time he spent hovering on the edge of death had damaged his physical body.

Days of testing by Leslie Thompkins had confirmed her initial fears, and she had been forced to deliver a painful ultimatum.

*****

_"I'm sorry."_

_Tim felt his throat go dry as he stared at Leslie in disbelief. Weeks of medical testing had finally come back with results, and none of the news was good._

_Leslie was somber and quiet as she gave Tim the time he needed to try and process all that he'd been told. As a doctor for all these years, she'd had plenty of experience delivering bad news to her patients. However, knowing what she knew about Tim, his family, and his work had made it all the more difficult._

_The teenager, alone with the doctor in her office, shook his head. "This is only temporary, right?" There was a pleading look in Tim's eyes. Although it had been a couple of weeks since the ordeal with the Onryo, he was still very ill and it showed on his face. For days now, both he and his family had wondered why his recovery was so going so slowly. Now he knew. "It's just going to take longer to recover? An extended leave perhaps? Different medication? A change in my diet?"_

_The silver haired doctor shook her head. "You've seen the results, Tim. Your heart's EF test result is at 37% and your lung capacity isn't much better. That's why you've been so tired, and have had such a hard time recovering. With a significant change in your lifestyle, you can live a normal civilian life. However, the damage is far too extensive for you to return to active vigilante work. The physical strain that it places on your body, coupled with your already compromised immune system due to the loss of your spleen months ago, would leave you vulnerable to heart failure, severe respiratory diseases, or worse."_

_"Is there any way to fix this, Leslie?" Tim asked, trying really hard to mask the panic in his voice. "To get to a point where I can work in the field again?"_

_"In the realm of traditional medicine?" Leslie sighed before glancing back at Tim. "Shy of organ transplant?"_

_Tim paled visibly, a hand unconsciously rising to rest against his chest, over his heart. He barely even noticed that his breathing had quickened to short shallow breaths._

_Leslie leaned forward to place a comforting hand on his shoulder. "Tim," she said softly. "Calm down. Breathe slowly... deeply..."_

_The young man closed his eyes tight and focused on following her instructions. It took a few minutes, but the impending panic attack was averted. When he finally felt calm enough to speak, Tim looked up at Leslie mournfully._

_"What do I do now?"_

*****

Timothy Drake's career as Red Robin was over. His body just couldn't handle the physical demands of being a vigilante anymore, not without putting his life at risk.   The ordeal with the Onryo had permanently damaged both his heart and his lungs. Just living day to day was going to become a struggle, at least for the foreseeable future.  Salting the wounds even further was the fact that to continue living in Gotham City, with all it's pollution and high stress atmosphere, was actually causing his organs to decline faster.

So plans were made. In addition to giving up "Red Robin", Tim had little choice but to leave Gotham City behind as well. His health was far too delicate now, and he needed to live somewhere  _cleaner_  to give his body a chance to heal. Perhaps he could return once he was stronger, but it was still far too early to estimate when that would be.

Tim reached over and placed a hand on Damian's shoulder. "Spending my favor to help you is not a waste," he said firmly. "Especially now that I'm not Red Robin." He waited for Damian to glance back at him before continuing.

"Bruce has been doing well enough on his own with the city and Batman Incorporated so far, but it's only a matter of time before he starts losing himself in  _The Mission_ ," Tim said gravely. "Being Robin to your father's Batman is more than just being by his side to help fight crime. One of the most important responsibilities of being Robin is anchoring Batman to his humanity. Being the light to his shadow. Making sure  _The Bat_  doesn't consume  _The Man_."

As the last words were given a moment to sink in, Tim regarded Damian with a tender concern he'd never shared with the younger boy before. The look made Damian's heart ache and a lump rise to his throat.

"Batman always needs a Robin," Tim said. "Your father needs you, Damian." He tapped the sketchbook that still rested in Damian's lap. "And you can't let fear of the unknown paralyze you. Especially in this city, you know that. And though I can't do much for him directly anymore, if I can do anything within my power to help you be the best Robin you can be, I will."

Damian bowed his head. "You're wrong."

"Hm?"

The boy looked up at his older brother. "Our father needs us both," he said in a halting tone. Then he removed his glasses before looking back at Tim, his grey eyes so young and old at the same time. "Our father needs you too, so you have to get better soon."

Damian's words surprised Tim, so much so that it left the teenager speechless. Then, without another word, he smiled at the boy before gently drawing him into a hug.

Tim's hug was nothing like Dick's, Damian noticed almost immediately. Whereas Dick's hugs were overwhelming and smothering with their affection, Tim's gave him room to breathe, but still gave him the feeling of being safe. He also noted, with a bit of surprise, that Tim tucked his head beneath his chin just as he had with the frightened Onryo child back in the astral plane. It was then that Damian made two realizations:

A hug from Dick was all about showing how much he loved you.

A hug from Tim was all about showing how much he wanted to protect you.

A polite knock at the door interrupted their quiet moment. The boys pulled away from each other as Damian answered. "Enter."

Alfred opened the door and regarded Tim with a sad expression. "It's time to go to the airport, Timothy," he said.

Tim looked startled. He hadn't realized so much time had passed. Damian looked surprised as well.

Then Tim drew in a measured breath and let it out slowly. He gave Titus a parting scritch behind the ears before rising to his feet. "The suitcases?"

"Are already in the car," Alfred assured him.

Tim nodded as he walked for the doorway.

"Drake?"

Tim paused and looked back and looked at Damian, who suddenly seemed so small sitting on his bed. "Yes?"

"When will you be back?"

The older boy sighed. "I honestly don't know. I guess... It all depends on my health now."

Tim was about to say something. He never got a chance to voice it because all of a sudden Damian hopped off his bed and rushed over to give him a tight hug. It reminded Tim of the hugs he used to get from Dick, the kind that always made him feel loved and wanted, and it made a lump rise up into his throat. Without a second thought, Tim pulled Damian away just enough to give him room to take a knee so he could return the boy's hug in kind.

"Take care of yourself," Tim ordered Damian in a thick voice. "And take care of our family." He pulled back just enough to look Damian in the face. "And don't you dare give Alfred any more grief, alright?"

Damian nodded as he wiped at his eyes.

Tim looked on Damian fondly. "When I get settled, I'll write you. While I'm gone, make sure you put that sketchbook to good use."

"I will."

Finally Tim rose to his feet and turned to where Alfred was waiting for him in the hallway. When he looked back at Damian, he smiled reassuringly. "Take care, Damian."

"Drake?"

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry," Damian whispered softly.

"For what?"

"For everything bad I ever did to you."

Tim nodded. "It's alright," he said. "Everything's forgiven."

When that seemed to be the final word of farewell, Tim followed Alfred out into the hallway and down the stairs into the main foyer. There was a heaviness in his heart that had nothing to do with his poor health.

"Drake!"

At the front door, Tim stopped and looked back to see Damian standing on the top of the stairs.

"Yes Damian?"

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For giving me a second chance."


	11. Epilogue

Tim sat in a waiting area alone as he looked out the window at the incoming airplane he would soon be boarding. He'd said his goodbyes and would now be heading to live overseas in Europe. His eyes automatically shifted to look at the distant Gotham City skyline. It made his heart ache to know that such a huge part of his life was suddenly over.

"So, do you regret any of it?"

Tim looked over his shoulder at John Constantine. The British paranomalist took a seat next to him.

"You mean with Minako?"

Constantine nodded.

Tim gave him a small smile and shook his head. "Of everything I've done with my life so far, saving that little girl's soul from hell is probably the last thing I regret."

"Even at the cost of your health?"

The younger man shrugged. "It was the right thing to do." Then he looked out the window at the airplanes coming and going. "Even if she never makes it to heaven, at least she's in the hands of a spirit, a mother, who will love and protect her." He glanced back at Constantine. "I was surprised, that night, when the Muonna was able to hold onto Minako and sever Hell's chains."

"A mother's love is a powerful force. Some of the most powerful protective charms in the mystic world are born from a mother's love for a child. You'll learn about them in your studies."

Tim turned to face Constantine fully. "So this is really is what you want as payment for helping save my life." He gave the Brit a skeptical look. "You want me as your apprentice."

Constantine nodded. "You were able to force Hell into a stalemate over a soul that should've gone to them. You have a strong will and a great deal of potential for this line of work."

"So I've been told."

The older man smirked. "I know. Jason Blood was quite put off with me for calling in my payment before he could offer to take you under his own wing." Clearly, doing exactly that amused the paranormal investigator to no end.

"But I have no magical talent," Tim said.

"You don't have to be born magic to work in this field," Constantine said dismissively. "Not everything paranormal is mystical. In fact, with your particular skill set, combined with what I will be able to teach you, it should make you a force to reckon with."

Tim sighed. "What about my health?" 

"Are you banned from reading books and handling small objects?"

"Of course not."

"Then you should be fine. By the way, does any of your family know that you'll be studying under me?"

Tim shook his head. "Except for one person, as far as anyone knows, I've quit vigilante work cold turkey and I'm returning to civilian life full-time."

"Who's the one?"

"A girl... A friend named Tam."

"Do you trust her?"

"With my life, secrets and all."

There was a moment of silence between the two men. Then, as a stewardess announced the start of boarding the aircraft for London, Tim voiced one more question.

"Why me?"

Constantine looked over at him with a knowing expression. "You'll see."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author's Notes:**
> 
> And here ends the story of **Kodokuna Shojo: A Lonely Girl**. I really hope the end of this tale was worth the wait. If you have any questions, comments, or critiques, please feel free to share them with me here.
> 
> Thank you all for reading.
> 
> ~CR. Scott


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